HN 
64 
H166t 


E  TRAGEDY  OF 
—  LABOR < 


ILL! AM  RILEY  HALSTEAD 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


^ 


BY  THIS  AUTHOR 

A  COSMIC  VIEW  OF  RELIGION 

Crown  8vo.     Net,  $1.50 


THE   TRAGEDY  OF 
LABOR 

A  MONOGRAPH  IN  FOLK 
PHILOSOPHY 


WILLIAM  RILEY  HALSTEAD 


THE  ABINGDON  PRESS 
NEW  YORK  CINCINNATI 


Copyright,  1919,  by 
WILLIAM  RILEY  HALSTEAD 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


I.    Appropriation 7 

II.  Private  Property  and  the  Wage  25 

III.  The   Opportunity    to    Make   a 

Living 34 

IV.  The  Community  and  the  Classes  45 
V.  The  Economic  Side  of  Socialism  69 

VI.  The  Soil 92 


APPROPRIATION 

So  far  as  my  neighbors  are  concerned, 
I  have  a  property  right  to  the  honey- 
bees in  my  yard.  How  it  came  to 
pass  that  I  have  the  feehng  of  owner- 
ship in  them  is  a  long,  long  story.  My 
neighbors  like  honey  as  well  as  I  do,  but 
they  understand  the  situation,  and  I  am 
not  disturbed.  The  civil  law  settles  for 
us  this  and  all  kindred  questions  of 
social  justice.  But  I  take  this  honey 
whenever  I  feel  like  it.  If  an  impulse 
should  take  my  bees  to  colonize  else- 
where, I  could  not  help  myself.  If  they 
could  understand  why  I  keep  them, 
they  ought  to  leave  me,  because  I  am 
a  robber.  They  have  certain  fine  cor- 
respondences with  truth  which  I  do  not 
have,  and  which  I  appropriate.  It 
7 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

takes  one  bee  about  one  hundred  trips, 
of,  say,  two  miles  each,  to  fill  with  honey 
one  cell  one  inch  long.  It  takes  two 
hundred  of  these  cells,  well  filled,  to  put 
in  good  shape  my  buttered  cakes  for 
breakfast.  I  gulp  down  at  one  meal 
the  product  of  forty  thousand  miles  of 
journey ings  among  the  flowers.  For 
my  one  breakfast  many  bees  have  worn 
out  their  wings,  and  have  ceased  at  once 
to  work  and  live.  I  am  the  extravagant 
yokefellow  of  that  ancient  epicure  king 
who  had  his  meat  service  made  of  the 
tongues  of  tropical  song  birds. 

I  am  a  cold-blooded  robber.  The  wild 
bear  in  the  woods  likes  honey  and  takes 
it.  I  take  it  for  the  same  reason.  The 
bees  resent  my  intrusions,  but  I  blow 
smoke  in  their  eyes  and  take  it.  I  have 
no  better  reason  for  what  I  do  than  my 
simian  ancestors.  My  act  is  a  flat,  un- 
mitigated appropriation — and  it  is  one 
of  nature's  tragedies.  I  leave  enough 
honey  in  the  hive  for  the  colony  to  win- 
ter through.  The  bear  would  do  the 
8 


APPROPRIATION 

same  thing  if  he  had  as  much  sense  as 
I  have.  He  eats  all  the  honey  and  the 
bees  also.  I  do  not  like  the  taste  of 
a  bee,  and  I  leave  it  some  of  the  golden 
nectar,  because  I  expect  to  rob  that 
hive  another  time.  The  bear  does  not 
know  whether  he  will  or  not.  He  has 
no  capacity  to  consider  that  proposi- 
tion. I  see  to  it  that  the  bees  get  on. 
I  make  for  them  a  better  housing.  I 
pad  the  stand  about  in  wintertime. 
They  feast  on  the  bloom  of  my  tulip 
trees.  I  sow  buckwheat  for  their  for- 
age. I  furnish  artificial  food  if  I  see 
that  I  have  cut  the  shces  too  deep.  But 
it  is  not  in  me  to  make  restitution  or 
reparation. 

The  bee  family  is  somewhat  advan- 
taged by  the  rapacity  of  the  robber. 
They  are  an  improved  breed.  They 
have  a  better  time.  They  have  fewer 
enemies  because  they  have  this  big  one. 
The  bees  prosper  because  the  robber  has 
learned  the  art  of  continuous  appropria- 
tion. I  am  the  superman.  I  have  ac- 
9 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

tually  accomplished  what  Germany  has 
started  out  to  do  for  the  other  peoples 
of  this  planet.  And  if  any  power  on 
earth  ever  comes  to  where  it  can  make 
use  of  my  toil  and  energy  for  my  own 
good,  I  will  begin  to  suspect  that  the 
logic  of  appropriation — pushed  to  such 
limits — measures  the  sum  of  all  villain- 
ies. And  why?  Between  myself  and 
my  bees  exists  the  biological  justifica- 
tion which  I  have  stated.  Between  my- 
self and  my  fellow  men  the  justification 
must  be  moral. 

For  thirty  years  my  driving  mare 
Maude  has  been  my  most  faithful  serv- 
ant. I  have  been  her  sole  owner  from 
the  foaling  time.  I  have  bitted  her  and 
harnessed  her  at  my  will.  I  have  worked 
her  often  to  the  limit.  When  she  has 
become  jaded,  I  have  given  her  a  brief 
rest,  and  then  urged  her  on  again. 
When  she  has  run  to  the  back  of  the 
pasture  to  escape  the  harness,  I  have 
punished  her.  She  now  pudges  about 
the  farm  not  worth  her  salt.  But  she 
10 


APPROPRIATION 

has  paid  for  her  keep  a  hundred  times 
over,  and  I  have  promised  her  provender 
and  a  stall  so  long  as  we  both  shall  hve. 
In  the  last  ten  years  we  have  become 
companionable.  She  tells  me  whether 
she  wants  ground  feed,  or  sheaf  oats, 
or  sweet  corn  stover.  When  I  have 
been  away  for  a  few  days  and  come 
around  the  corner  of  the  lot,  she  comes 
across  to  greet  me.  She  has  fared  bet- 
ter under  my  ownership  than  if  she  had 
been  turned  into  the  wilds  when  a  colt. 
But  in  all  the  years  of  her  usefulness, 
even  that  mild  altruism  never  entered 
my  head.  I  have  appropriated  her 
splendid  qualities  and  have  worn  her 
out. 

Now,  reader,  put  on  your  thinker  a 
minute,  and  let  us  see  where  this  prin- 
ciple of  appropriation  leads  when  it 
comes  to  be  applied  to  the  human  life. 

With  all  living  things  nutrition  is  a 
necessity.  The  supply  of  nutrition  is 
life's  counterpart.  Hungry  worms  and 
11 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

bugs  and  birds  and  animals  and  men 
are  alike  the  subjects  of  the  one  insist- 
ent impulse  to  appropriate  whatever 
may  supply  a  need.  The  law  of  it  is 
universal.  The  conflicts  of  life  are 
about  the  supply  of  an  insatiate  need. 
The  need  is  continuous — the  supply 
must  be  also,  and  adequate,  if  hfe  per- 
sists. If  the  supply  is  abundant,  there 
is  wholesale  appropriation,  and  a  general 
fattening.  Among  the  lower  hfe  forms 
one  form  often  feeds  on  another;  and 
where  the  need  crowds  the  supply,  there 
is  conflict  over  possession,  and  the  devil 
takes  the  hindmost.  Mr.  Darwin  made 
splendid  use  of  the  principle  of  conflict 
in  his  explanation  of  life's  survivals. 
Some  factors  in  the  natural  world  which 
he  did  not  fully  consider  modify,  to  a 
degree,  his  conclusions,  but  his  interpre- 
tation stands.  Survival  is  not  the  end 
of  life.  The  final  end  of  all  life  is  ex- 
tinction, and  its  meaning,  therefore, 
must  be  an  overplay. 

Whether  or  not  it  be  a  remaining 
12 


APPROPRIATION 

animal  trait,  the  particular  inclination 
to  appropriate  whatever  the  eye  sees, 
the  appetite  craves,  and  the  hands  can 
reach,  is  deep  laid  in  human  nature. 
Place  two  babies  in  reach  of  each  other, 
and  there  is  immediate  difficulty.    One 
appropriates  a  bib,  and  the  other  a  fist, 
and  tries  to  swallow  it.    Years  ago  I 
picked  up  from  the  pavement  a  pocket- 
book  and  opened  the  clasp  and  saw  it 
bulging  with  money.     I  immediately 
looked  all  about  to  see  if  anyone  saw 
me  pick  it  up.    Why  did  I  do  that?    It 
was  a  remaining  baby  trait  not  yet 
grilled  out.     I  submit  that  a  man  is 
never  as  bad  as  his  worst — and  he  is 
never  as  good  as  he  thinks  he  is.    I  met 
a  woman  in  twenty  minutes,  greatly 
flustrated,  to  whom  I  handed  the  purse, 
and  she  said  to  me,  "Sir,  you  are  an 
honest  man."  I  thanked  her,  but  I  did 
not  tell  her  all. 

The  habit  of  the  primitive  man  is 
to  appropriate  whatever  he  wants  and 
can   get   from   the   wilds.     Abraham 
13 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

staked  off  the  best  pieces  of  pasture 
lands  he  could  find,  and  he  made  things 
unpleasant  for  all  intruders.  But  it  is 
not  a  long  journey  from  the  patriarch's 
time  to  where  that  kind  of  appropri- 
ation becomes  a  crime  fit  to  be  punished. 
Man's  associative  life  comes  in  to 
modify  the  terms  of  all  raw  appropria- 
tion. People  do  not  live  long  in  any 
favored  region  until  the  spontaneous 
products  of  the  earth  are  not  equal  to 
human  needs.  Population  crowds  sub- 
sistence, under  the  law  of  Malthus, 
wherever  nature  is  unaided.  The  soil, 
the  sky,  and  the  sea  become  only  the 
potential  sources  of  human  sustenance, 
and  other  progressive  needs.  Posses- 
sion begins  to  have  a  social  significance 
at  the  point  where  possession  is  the  re- 
sult of  labor  bestowed.  The  right  of 
possession  gets  itself  clear  cut  about  the 
edges  at  the  point  where  labor  makes 
the  soil  produce  what  it  would  not  do 
unaided,  or  where  human  ingenuity 
shapes  a  mechanism.  These  new  factors 
14 


APPKOPRIATION 

bring  about  a  new  set  of  understandings 
to  modify  the  whole  question  of  appro- 
priation. I  may  not,  therefore,  go  out 
among  my  neighbors  and  appropriate 
everything  in  sight.  Possession  there, 
in  an  orderly  society,  implies  the  in- 
crement of  earning.  The  "mine"  and 
the  "thine"  appears  under  customs  and 
rules  of  fairness  and  equity.  The  spot 
where  a  man  digs  for  his  own  lentils 
begins  to  be  made  socially  secure  to  him. 
Until  that  is  so,  he  has  no  heart  to  dig, 
because  he  has  no  show  for  his  life.  If 
any  one  stronger  than  he  is  may  ap- 
propriate his  lentils,  the  motives  for  toil 
are  overthrown,  both  with  the  weak 
and  the  strong.  It  is  the  same  with  a 
man's  tools,  his  coat,  his  domicile.  The 
right  of  possession  inheres  in  what  a 
man  makes  or  earns.  The  conception 
of  private  property,  therefore,  becomes 
the  economic  base  of  material  pros- 
perity. The  Magna  Charta  of  the 
naked  toiler's  life  is  the  secured  right 
to  what  he  makes  or  earns.    It  gives  him 

15 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

the  impetus  to  accumulate  and  conserve. 
One  of  the  greatest  achievements  of 
civil  liberty  is  the  vast  diffusion  of 
property  values  in  the  modern  world. 
It  is  the  explanation  of  why  the  world 
grows  rich  beyond  the  El  Dorado 
dreams.  The  law  of  property  was  sel- 
dom administered  in  equity  among  an- 
cient peoples.  I  do  not  call  to  mind  an 
instance  of  wealth  generally  diffused 
in  the  world's  earlier  time.  The  motive 
was  absent  in  protected  right.  An  an- 
cient rich  man,  if  he  had  not  friends  at 
court,  was  always  a  plump  partridge 
for  the  hawks.  The  average  toiler  was 
always  stripped  to  the  bone.  The  old 
animal  law  and  impulse  was  in  vogue, 
and  myriad  excuses  were  invented  for 
its  exercise.  The  secured  right  under 
dependable  law  to  one's  honest  earn- 
ings is  not  an  old  social  guarantee.  It 
runs  not  much  further  back  than  the 
Enghsh  burghers  and  King  John.  The 
"mine"  and  the  "thine"  has  always  been 
known  because  it  is  an  inherency,  but 
16 


APPROPRIATION 

the  recognition  and  civil  assertion  of 
it  as  an  efficient  economic  factor  in  the 
world's  Hfe  is  not  an  inheritance,  but 
one  of  the  conquests  of  personal  lib- 
erty. 

The  obligation  to  toil  carries  with  it 
the  right  to  its  product.  No  social 
dreamer  has  ever  been  able  to  introduce 
a  practical  substitute  for  the  principle 
of  private  property.  No  other  motive 
to  industry  and  saving  has  ever  been 
so  strong  to  call  out  the  economic  best 
of  the  personal  life.  It  is  the  life  of 
industrialism.  Under  its  action  the 
physical  aspect  of  the  earth  is  being  re- 
fashioned and  transformed.  If  a  man 
makes  an  ax  handle,  and  has  come  hon- 
estly by  the  timber,  he  has  become  a 
wealthy  man  by  so  much  as  that  tool 
is  worth  more  than  the  green  stick  in 
the  tree.  He  has  put  on  it  an  added 
value,  and  that  value  is  his.  Any 
proposition  to  the  contrary  is  socialistic 
nonsense. 

What  is  wealth?  Anything  of  value. 
17 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

What  is  property?  Wealth  related  to 
its  owner.  What  is  capital?  Wealth 
used  in  the  production  of  other  wealth. 
The  sin  of  capital  does  not  exist.  Sin 
is  always  personal.  The  curse  of  capi- 
tal is  in  its  misuse.  The  curse  of  chem- 
istry is  that  it  is  now  killing  its  millions. 
The  curse  of  the  sunshine  is  its  con- 
flagrations. The  law  of  the  chemistries 
and  of  the  sunshine  obeyed  has  no  be- 
trayals. It  is  the  human  which  plays 
havoc  with  these  things. 

But  property  must  be  understood  as 
having  an  associative  meaning.  It  is  so- 
cially related  because  the  owner  cannot 
escape  his  social  obligations.  The  owner 
of  an  ax  handle  sets  it  in  the  eye  of  an 
ax,  then  he  splits  kindling  to  start  fur- 
nace fires,  and  scores  of  httle  babies  are 
kept  snug  and  warm.  An  ax  handle 
contributes  to  the  cause  of  civilization. 

Any  refusal  to  obey  this  law  of  re- 
latedness,  any  reversal  of  it,  any  at- 
tempted exclusiveness,  any  tearing 
down  of  barns  to  build  larger,  any 
18 


APPROPRIATION 

wholesale  piggishness,  any  big-dog  tak- 
ing the  whole  bone  to  hide  what  he  can- 
not eat,  is  humanly  destructive.  The 
self -centered  property  holder  is  a  social 
bandit.  Property,  if  it  conserves  itself, 
must  make  its  contribution  to  society. 
Human  beings  do  not  get  along  together 
at  all  unless  they  have  advantages  and 
amenities  in  common.  Diogenes  in  his 
tub,  asking  only  that  others  keep  out  of 
his  sunshine,  has  in  it  the  sum  of  all 
absurdities.  His  kind  are  social  pariahs 
and  blood-suckers.  We  are  to  live  by 
what  we  earn,  but  we  are  to  live  to- 
gether. In  civilized  society,  each  holder 
of  any  property  is  advantaged  more  by 
what  his  fellows  have  than  by  what  he 
has  himself.  As  soon  as  we  are  born 
we  are  the  recipients  of  advantage  from 
that  biological  complex  which  we  call 
society,  and  the  stream  of  it  takes  care 
of  itself  to  come  our  way.  Take  any 
rich  man  in  America  and  put  him  stark 
naked  in  the  heart  of  Africa — ^then  fur- 
nish him  with  a  few  yards  of  ten-cent 
19 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

red  muslin  to  clothe  himself  withal,  and 
he  will  soon  see  what  civilized  society 
means.  Under  advanced  Hving  con- 
ditions the  largest  blessings  of  life  are 
not  derived  from  the  self -energy,  but 
from  the  fact  that  those  about  us  are 
toilers  and  producers  of  value.  My 
farm  has  value  not  so  much  because  I 
make  it  produce  as  because  my  neigh- 
bors have  farms  just  as  good  and  pro- 
ductive. 

The  right  of  appropriation  and  use, 
therefore,  which  would  be  absolute  in 
any  solitary  state,  is  modified  by  the 
obligation  to  contribute  to  that  which 
secures  the  right  in  law  and  custom,  and 
that  which  multiplies  the  values  of  all 
personal  holding  a  hundredfold.  Man's 
civil  institutions  have  never  yet  ade- 
quately pressed  the  importance  of  that 
feature  of  the  property  life  of  the  world 
on  the  masses.  The  free  rein  to  self- 
getting  has  never  been  drawn  to  the 
full  protection  of  community  interests. 
The  right  to  earn  and  get  is  not  to  be 
20 


APPROPRIATION 

disputed,  but  the  obligation  which  comes 
with  it  is  to  be  demanded. 

New  and  unprecedented  conditions 
have  come  about  among  Western  peo- 
ples. The  profits  of  production  natur- 
ally tend  to  collect  in  currents.  A  few 
have  been  shrewd  to  manipulate  these 
currents  and  to  extract  tribute  by  con- 
tributing to  the  movement.  The  result 
has  been  individual  accumulation  in  a 
vast  way.  Quite  a  number  of  those  who 
have  become  famous  as  wealthy  men  ap- 
pear to  be  doing  their  level  best  to 
socialize  their  wealth,  but  the  fact  re- 
mains that  the  power  which  their  per- 
sonal holdings  puts  into  their  hands  be- 
comes a  menace.  Wealth  in  such  vast 
personal  accumulation  does  not  relate 
itself  normally  to  society  as  small  prop- 
erty values  do.  Those  who  administer 
such  large  accumulations  are  able  to  de- 
termine other  interests  than  their  own. 
They  have  power  to  put  competition  out 
of  action.    They  have  power  to  shut  out 

of  work  many  thousands  of  honest  and 
21 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

dependent  workmen.  They  have  power 
to  shut  the  open  door  of  business.  They 
have  the  power  of  commercial  paralysis. 
Society  is  interested  in  a  magnitude. 
It  has  grown  to  where  it  must  be  put 
under  bond  to  the  public,  which  now  car- 
ries a  risk,  until  that  bond  is  signed  and 
sealed. 

This  principle  of  associative  obliga- 
tion appMes  with  equal  force  to  bodies 
of  workmen  where  they  constitute  a 
group,  and  have  come  to  exercise  their 
right  to  concert  of  action  concerning 
wages  and  the  other  conditions  of  labor. 
The  workmen  who  toil  and  the  capital 
investment  which  makes  employment 
possible,  are  both  dependent  on  the 
common  community  Hfe  to  which  they 
belong.  Before  one  has  a  strike,  or 
the  other  a  lockout,  the  community 
ought  to  be  able  to  express  itself  as  the 
party  of  the  larger  interest.  The  con- 
tention that  a  thousand  men  may  do 
with  impunity  whatever  one  man  may 
do  is  utterly  untenable.  Whenever 
22 


APPROPRIATION 

bodies  of  men  act  in  concert  they  be- 
come amenable  to  the  community  in  the 
degree  that  they  are  able  to  make  use 
of  its  collective  social  values.  An  in- 
crease of  power  means  an  increase  of 
responsibility.  There  ought  not  to 
exist  anywhere  an  investment  of  power 
able  to  throw  the  business  affairs  of  a 
community  into  confusion,  and  for  the 
plain  reason  that  the  whole  of  a  thing 
must  be  made  first  over  any  of  its  parts. 
The  community  welfare  is  of  so  much 
greater  value  than  that  of  any  individ- 
ual that  a  few  extra  dollars  to  be  earned, 
or  a  larger  profit  secured,  must  not 
weigh  successfully  against  it.  And 
a  clash  of  interest  in  the  long  run  is 
not  possible.  A  healthy  body  means 
healthy  organs — healthy  cells. 

Identity  of  interest  is  through  run- 
ning. One  of  the  defects  of  much  in- 
dustrial thinking  is  that  it  is  not  broad- 
ened by  a  knowledge  which  includes  the 
social  vision.  It  rises  up  to  challenge 
the  centers  of  control.  It  is  a  new  kind 
23 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

of  social  brigandage.  It  refused  to  con- 
sider the  right  of  the  equal  opportunity, 
and  nobody  left  out.  The  few  must  not 
fatten  to  the  detriment  of  the  many.  It 
is  a  poor  kind  of  mind  which  does  not 
see  that.  Democracy  in  the  world  in  its 
action  is  a  lubberly  thing.  It  will  not 
come  to  its  own  until  it  articulates  with 
the  last  man,  and  puts  an  end  to  special 
privilege,  and  monopoly,  and  all  kinds 
of  exploiting.  The  people  have  set 
themselves  to  rule,  but  they  have  not  yet 
come  into  their  kingdom.  When  they 
do,  neither  capital  nor  labor,  even  under 
a  just  contention,  will  be  allowed  to  ap- 
propriate that  to  which  it  has  no  right — 
the  general  economic  welfare  and  hap- 
piness of  the  whole  community. 


24 


II 


PRIVATE      PROPERTY     AND 
THE  WAGE 

Certain  economists  of  brilliant 
rhetoric  denounce  capital  in  toto.  "Cap- 
italism" is  the  opprobrious  term.  Their 
contention  is  that  capital  pitted  against 
the  workman  is  the  bane  of  civilization. 
Labor  ought  to  own  what  it  produces. 
Capital  ought  to  be  abolished — so  ought 
the  capitalistic  class ;  and  for  the  reason, 
it  is  said,  that  the  product  of  labor 
turned  back  into  industrial  enterprise 
to  become  an  earning  factor  takes  com- 
mand of  the  laborer  by  making  him  a 
competing  force  with  that  which  he  pro- 
duces. The  fallacy  o^  that  position  is 
clearly  seen.  Does  the  maker  of  an  ax 
handle  or  a  hammer  come  into  competi- 
tion with  his  tool  when  he  uses  it? 
25 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

There  is  no  other  principle  involved  in 
that  kind  of  use  of  any  value.  The 
toiler  struggles  not  against  that  which 
he  produces.  His  controversy  is  often 
with  the  manager  of  capital,  who  knows 
and  uses  his  power  to  overbear  and  op- 
press. There  can  be  no  objection  to  the 
proposition  that  a  man  ought  to  own 
what  he  makes.  But  a  civilized  man 
does  not  wish  to  own  all  that  he  makes. 
One  man  cannot  make  everything,  and 
every  man  ought  not  to  make  the  same 
thing.  A  man  often  wishes  to  exchange 
what  he  makes  for  that  which  another 
makes.  But  exchange  in  kind  is  not  al- 
ways feasible.  So  economic  society  has 
invented  certain  equivalents  of  value  to 
expedite  exchange.  Production  is  a 
necessity.  Exchange  is  a  necessity. 
And  the  use  of  that  which  is  exchanged 
v/ears  it  out  directly,  and  that  makes 
way  for  new  production;  and  whether 
or  not  that  circle  is  vicious  depends  on 
the  way  we  go  about  it. 

Two  men  make  a  wagon.    When  it  is 

26 


PROPERTY  AND  WAGE 

finished,  by  common  consent,  each  man 
owns  one  half.  But  a  wagon  is  not  often 
conveniently  owned  in  partnership. 
One  man  gives  the  other  an  equivalent 
for  his  half  and  owns  all  the  wagon. 
The  man  who  gets  the  equivalent  gives 
it  to  a  third  man  to  help  him  build  an- 
other wagon.  So  the  endless  chain 
starts.  And  all  the  elements  of  both 
production  and  exchange  are  now  in 
motion.  The  produce  of  labor  is  being 
turned  back  to  increase  the  number  of 
laborers.  Business  is  advantaged  by 
making  a  part  of  the  product  of  labor 
an  earning  factor.  Wagon  makers  are 
given  a  chance  to  own  something  besides 
wagons,  when  other  men  are  busy  mak- 
ing other  things. 

Now,  that  is  not  an  invented  economic 
machine.  It  is  the  normal  economic 
evolution  of  human  industry.  It  is  the 
application  of  plain  common  sense  to 
an  industrial  situation.  Nobody 
harmed.  Nobody  disadvantaged.  But 
as  business  in  this  way  grows,  and  each 
27 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

separate  pursuit  of  man  begins  to  take 
on  its  own  differential,  it  becomes  the 
custom  to  take  an  equivalent  for  labor, 
rather  than  the  product  itself.  Labor 
becomes  standardized.  After  a  time  it 
is  called  the  wage.  The  wage  is  sup- 
posed to  be  the  equivalence  divided  into 
tidbits.  It  is  a  great  convenience.  The 
wage  system  will  stand.  The  majority 
of  men  wish  to  work  without  the  tax  of 
administration.  Many  have  a  fine 
capacity  for  skilled  work  without 
capacity  for  the  executive  efficiencies  so 
necessary  to  successful  business.  The 
profits  of  business  under  the  wage  plan 
are  seen  directly  to  have  an  earning 
power.  This  power  utilized  increases 
profits,  and  the  door  of  opportunity  is 
opened  for  other  laborers,  and  nobody 
is  disadvantaged.  Where  is  the  bug- 
bear— where  the  "blood  and  dirt"? 
There  is  nothing  invalid  about  it  under 
the  law  of  thrift,  and  none  under  the 
law  of  mutual  justice.  Man  has  not 
learned  a  better  economic  way.     The 

28 


PROPERTY  AND  WAGE 

plan  of  it  has  become  an  industrial 
axiom.  It  is  questioned  only  by  those 
who  put  themselves  under  a  strain  to 
find  out  some  new  thing. 

But  has  the  plan  of  it  always  worked 
smoothly?  No.  Grit  in  the  cogs?  Yes. 
Because  of  the  way  of  it?  No.  It  was 
a  sad  day  when  somebody  learned  that 
a  trick  could  be  played  with  capital. 
Under  the  trick  of  it  the  millions  have 
suffered.  They  rightly  put  themselves 
against  the  trick — or  rather  the  trick- 
ster— and  not  against  that  which  has 
no  sensible  substitute.  It  is  a  dull  mind 
which  cannot  distinguish  between  a  vital 
industrial  factor  and  its  misuse.  If  we 
start  out  to  abolish  everything  which 
has  the  possibility  of  a  trick  in  it,  we 
may  prepare  to  move  off  the  planet. 
We  shall  abolish  dynamite  and  lucifer 
matches.  We  shall  abolish  the  rivers 
and  the  mountains.  We  shall  abolish 
the  sunshine  and  all  zero  weather. 

Put  a  hook  in  the  nose  of  the  trick- 
ster, and  stop  there.  Let  the  industrial 

29 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

method  stand.  It  has  stood  the  test 
of  the  ages.  The  cooperation  of  the 
laborer  with  his  product  is  simply  the 
partnership  of  the  man  with  his  ham- 
mer. A  man  ought  not  to  have  a  quar- 
rel with  his  hammer.  It  is  true  that  the 
full  equivalent  in  the  wage  is  not  al- 
ways received.  That  is  the  fault  of  the 
rascal  on  the  other  side  of  the  fence. 
The  just  way  of  it  imphes  an  equiva- 
lent, and  men  everywhere  cling  to  it 
because  they  are  convinced  of  its  con- 
venience and  mutual  fairness.  Our 
methods  of  production  and  exchange 
will  not  have  any  radical  shift,  because 
they  are  the  results  of  long  experience, 
and  they  are  natural,  and  the  validity 
of  contract  under  them  must  also 
stand.  And  since  that  is  so,  human 
society  has  no  way  of  preventing  any 
of  us  from  getting  the  worst  of  a  con- 
tract occasionally.  When  we  get  what 
we  bargain  for,  it  is  only  one  of  the 
challenges  of  life  to  take  out  in  experi- 
ence what  we  did  not  get  in  the  bargain. 

30 


PROPERTY  AND  WAGE 

If  a  contract  is  open  and  without  deceit, 
it  is  not  robbery.  We  shall  always 
have  instances  of  less  than  the  just 
wage.  And  we  shall  have  instances  of 
more  than  a  just  wage.  And  when  the 
whole  issue  is  driven  into  that  particular 
corner,  the  problem  is  simplified  and  we 
may  deal  with  it  without  turning  the 
world  topsy-turvy. 

The  wage  cannot  be  stratified  because 
business  enterprises  are  unequal.  There 
is  no  remedy  for  the  unequal  wage,  as 
there  is  none  for  the  unequal  ownership 
of  property.  In  much  of  the  world's 
work  a  large  wage  cannot  be  paid  be- 
cause the  work  done  will  not  yield  it. 
Human  society  has  no  remedy  for  that 
situation.  The  minimum  wage  is  a 
social  beneficence,  but  it  could  be  placed 
at  a  point  where  much  of  the  world's 
work  would  go  undone.  There  can  be 
no  social  arrangement  made  to  relieve 
incapacity  and  lack  of  wit  from  the 
distress  of  itself.  To  the  indigent  and 
helpless  belong  the  humanities,  which 

31 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

must  be  administered  to  them  aside 
from  the  trade  equities.  A  dolt  will  eat 
as  many  biscuits  for  breakfast  as 
Shakespeare,  but  the  two  can  never  be 
identically  conditioned.  There  ought 
not  to  be  equality  of  living  between  a 
life  of  temperance  and  probity  and  one 
of  hbertinism  and  crime.  Distress 
should  not  be  put  on  the  strong  in  order 
to  give  the  worthless  a  quiet  time. 
Sponges  and  defectives  should  not  have 
the  first  dip  in  the  dish.  There  is  a 
maudlin  sympathy  which  would  put  all 
the  neurotics  in  cotton  batting.  Society 
can  never  go  into  the  business  of  nurs- 
ing defectives  with  useless  refinements. 
Neither  can  it  build  a  criminal  code  on 
the  theory  that  all  criminals  are  simply 
diseased,  and  need  a  doctor  more  than 
the  consequences  in  punitive  law.  The 
soft  theory  contradicts  the  plain  facts 
of  life.  No  one  has  any  right  to  the 
social  attention  which  will  keep  his 
tenderness  from  graving  the  rocks  any- 
where.   It  is  not  good  for  any  man  to 

32 


PROPERTY  AND  WAGE 

get  it  into  his  head  that  the  ravens  are 
obhged  to  feed  him.  The  cry  of  the 
honest  poor  must  always  be  heard,  and 
the  call  of  justice  must  be  a  thunder 
note,  but  the  economic  society  which 
undertakes  to  coddle  all  comers  will 
finally  eliminate  the  fit. 


33 


Ill 

THE     OPPORTUNITY     TO 
MAKE  A  LIVING 

The  average  workman  to-day  is  not 
making  any  demand  to  have  built  for 
himself  a  fool's  paradise.  He  is  in- 
tensely interested  in  the  question  of  a 
social  opportunity  to  get  on  in  the 
world.  The  hazard  of  no  work,  for  the 
bread  winner,  is  now  a  nightmare  in  the 
doorway  of  millions  of  homes.  There 
are  millions  of  straight  toilers  who  have 
put  no  tarnish  on  any  dollar  they  have 
ever  earned:  they  have  lived  the  up- 
right life,  they  have  not  lacked  energy, 
they  have  provident  habits,  they  have 
had  the  average  capacity  for  shifting — 
and  they  have  often  suffered  the  keen 
distress  of  unemployment.  At  times 
millions  want  work  and  cannot  get  it. 

34 


OPPORTUNITY 

They  have  not  been  able  to  protect 
themselves  from  the  new  directions  and 
the  reversals  in  business.  They  are  not 
applicants  for  charity.  They  are  not 
township  wards.  They  refuse  the  prof- 
fered aid  which  costs  them  their  self- 
respect.  They  are  always  willing  to 
give  honest  work  for  honest  money. 
But  they  have  heard  the  wolf  bark  at 
the  door. 

The  question  is  this — must  it  be  that 
the  advance  of  civilization  increases  the 
stress  and  tension  of  the  honest  wage- 
earner's  life?  The  issue  is  intricate  and 
involved.  But  only  the  thinker  who  is 
a  coward  to-day  runs  away  from  it. 
Can  the  civil  administration  guarantee 
to  competent  and  worthy  workmen  an 
opportunity  to  work  for  a  living? 

An  occasional  man  out  of  a  job  may 
be  considered  sporadic,  and  negligible, 
so  far  as  society  is  concerned.  Ten 
thousand  men  in  a  single  city  out  of 
work  presents  a  situation  which  meas- 
ures to  the  magnitude  of  a  social  ad- 

35 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

versity.  But  if  the  community  steps  in 
to  provide  work  for  these  ten  thousand, 
what  has  come  to  pass?  Are  we  not 
then  in  the  edges  of  a  paternahsm  which 
will  unnerve  the  citizenship  directly? 
Must  there  be  a  social  somewhat  to 
catch  every  workman  when  he  falls — 
and  will  not  the  fact  of  it  put  him  in 
leading  strings?  Is  it  good  for  him  to 
be  reheved  from  the  necessity  of  having 
his  wits  about  him?  Need  he  then  look 
ahead  for  any  landshde?  Will  not  such 
a  provision  be  the  downfall  of  the  in- 
dustrial manhood?  Will  it  not  defeat 
the  self -origination?  Will  it  not  make 
the  human  intellect  sterile?  Is  not  the 
perpetual  challenge  of  the  breadhne 
good  for  a  man? 

Now,  the  logic  of  that  kind  of  ques- 
tioning— sound  as  much  of  it  is — ^means 
that  ten  thousand  men  at  a  time  out  of 
work  must  simply  be  left  to  themselves. 
Ask  them  to  trust  God  and  keep  the 
law?  What  law?  What  law  is  more 
imperious  than  hunger?  To  find  a 
36 


OPPORTUNITY 

social  response  to  that  situation  is 
simply  a  question  of  adroitness.  A  long 
time  ago  DeTocqueville  became 
alarmed  at  the  swift  growth  of  democ- 
racy. He  said  we  needed  a  new  politi- 
cal science,  that  we  had  run  clear  out 
of  any  historic  precedent  to  guide  us. 
Men  have  now  come  together  in  such 
masses  under  the  demand  of  great  en- 
terprises that  they  have  gotten  in  each 
other's  way.  There  would  be  a  busi- 
ness or  a  job  for  each  man,  and  a  man 
for  each  job,  if  a  hungry  man  could 
wait  for  the  mill  of  the  gods  to  grind 
him  a  grist.  The  economic  gestation  is 
too  slow  for  the  human  stomach.  The 
rhythm  of  one  is  at  most  a  few  measured 
hours ;  the  rhythm  of  the  other  is  often 
ten  years.    The  confusion  is  cosmic. 

Things  are  not  all  well  with  this 
world  because  the  very  splendor  of  it 
has  overtaxed  the  human  wit.  While 
the  earth  is  being  transformed  much 
confusion  takes  place  in  the  movement 
of  it.  While  many  get  on,  too  many 
37 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

people  get  run  over.  Blakelock  the 
artist,  with  a  wife  and  nine  children, 
discovered  that  bread  and  shelter  and  a 
fire  cost  more  than  his  soul  spread  out 
on  canvas  would  bring  in  the  market 
— and  it  sent  him  mad.  After  twenty 
years  in  the  asylum  he  was  released,  and 
was  taken  to  see  his  pictures,  some  of 
which  had  brought  twenty  thousand 
dollars. 

On  Blackwell's  Island,  New  York 
city,  at  this  time,  two  thousand  home- 
less, despairing  old  women  are  housed. 
They  die  there,  one  by  one,  and  their 
bodies  are  taken  to  the  potter's  field. 
When  these  women  were  young  they 
toiled  and  served — and  sinned,  it  may 
be — but  they  are  here  in  a  corral,  to  be 
pitched  out  at  a  great  city's  gehenna 
gate.  Probably  much  more  than  this 
number  of  the  refuse  of  womankind  in 
the  great  city  lies  hidden  in  oblivion. 
The  damnation  of  it  is  not  in  the  death 
of  them,  but  at  the  point  where  civiliza- 
tion slays  the  human  spirit.   We  have 

38 


OPPORTUNITY 

come  to  a  place  in  the  world's  advancing 
life  where  the  common  man  always  runs 
the  narrow  risk  of  being  swallowed  up. 
Our  fine  theories  about  tactfulness  and 
shift  and  adaptabihty  amount  to  noth- 
ing. The  toiler  goes  to  the  limit  of  his 
powers,  and  he  will  get  on  if  his  job 
lasts.  His  job  to  him  is  the  greatest 
thing  this  side  of  heaven.  The  slim  ten- 
ure of  it  which  hangs  over  him  like  a 
shadow  has  come  to  be  more  than  an 
incident  of  progress.  It  is  the  dispirit- 
ing of  the  million.  If  civihzation  be- 
comes the  friend  only  of  the  mentally 
and  physically  strong,  it  has  become  a 
brute  survival.  There  is  no  actual 
progress  in  it  until  it  has  found  the 
middle  way  where,  if  some  travel  in 
luxury,  all  may  travel  in  comfort,  if 
they  meet  hfe's  normal  demands.  It  is 
not  worth  while  to  try  to  fasten  respon- 
sibility with  any  wholesale  accusation. 
The  ignoramus  only  knows  who  did  it. 
The  student  of  affairs  finds  in  it  a  per- 
plexing and  intricate  problem.  He 
39 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

sees  the  human  life  exploited  in  a  cu- 
mulative rush.  He  sees  the  joy  of  life 
go  out  of  the  faces  of  the  multitudes 
as  they  are  beaten  back  in  their  efforts 
to  get  on.  People  of  the  same  race 
blood,  readers  of  the  same  books, 
patrons  of  the  same  schools,  dwellers  in 
the  same  neighborhood,  lovers  of  the 
same  art  and  music,  believers  in  the 
same  faith,  undercut  and  slaughter  with 
a  ruthless  hand;  they  engage  in  a  veri- 
table bull  fight  over  the  world's  stuff. 
The  economic  strife  makes  relentless 
enemies.  The  situation  is  serious  when 
eighty  per  cent  of  those  who  struggle 
must  face  disappointed  desire.  So 
many  men  now  pass  the  measured  hours 
without  alacrity  or  joy.  They  collect 
in  groups  and  are  silent  and  sullen. 
And  they  accent  a  situation  where  their 
souls  are  being  tried.  It  is  dehumaniz- 
ing. It  is  a  tragedy  of  the  false  and 
the  unreal. 

As  the  French  scholar  thought,  the 
rush    of   business    has    outgrown    the 
40 


OPPORTUNITY 

science  of  it.  Economic  law  has  not 
kept  pace  with  personal  and  social 
needs.  We  have  smitten  the  earth  and 
it  has  brought  forth  its  responses,  and 
we  have  been  careless  about  the  co- 
ordinations of  justice  among  those 
who  are  to  divide  the  spoil.  We  have 
not  taken  an  invoice  to  find  out  the 
debits  and  credits  of  anything  but  dol- 
lars and  cents.  We  are  astonished  and 
alarmed  to  find  that  civihzation  has 
produced  a  Moloch  with  red-hot  arms. 
Material  conditions  are  advanced  and 
the  uncertainties  of  getting  on  have  in- 
creased. The  tension  of  the  situation 
is  through  running.  The  very  soul  of 
the  community  will  snap  directly.  But 
any  wholesale  recrimination  and  abuse 
about  it  is  superficial  and  petulant.  It 
is  a  very  great  weakness  to  translate 
the  distress  of  it  into  a  spleen  against 
some  imagined  enemy.  Capitalists  are 
only  ordinary  sinners.  It  is  not  tenable 
to  charge  this  particular  feature  of  the 
problem  up  to  the  milhonaires.  If  they 
41 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

were  all  set  in  a  row  and  shot,  and 
their  property  confiscated  and  divided 
equally  between  one  hundred  millions 
of  people,  there  would  only  be  a  snip 
for  each  one — not  near  enough  to  keep 
us  alive  until  the  country  could  be  re- 
stored from  the  consequences  of  the 
dastardly  act.  Is  it  the  fault  of  capital 
that  the  country  regions  are  being  de- 
pleted and  the  cities  overcrowded,  and 
food  products  reaching  an  alarming 
price?  Anybody  knows  that  food  short- 
age means  not  enough  people  digging 
in  the  soil.  The  remedy  for  that  could 
be  applied  almost  instantly.  But  it  will 
not  be  because  city  people  yet  prefer  the 
disease  to  the  remedy.  If  gangrene 
sets  in,  there  will  be  a  return  to  the 
lauded  glories  of  farm  life. 

We  have  come  to  the  place  where 
city  workmen  especially  cannot  do  for 
themselves  what  they  once  did,  under 
the  simpler  and  less  complex  conditions 
of  sparse  population.  The  right  of 
equal  opportunity  for  all  alike  must  be 
42 


OPPORTUNITY 

made  to  include  now  the  actual  oppor- 
tunity to  get  on  under  civilized  condi- 
tions. The  civil  administration  must 
deal  with  the  actual  situation  of  the 
stranded  mass.  When  overproduction 
throws  men  out,  or  the  shifts  of  demand, 
or  a  new  invention  makes  useless  a  lot 
of  skilled  labor,  the  personal  shiftiness 
is  not  always  equal  to  the  necessities  of 
the  case.  To  men  thrown  under  by  in- 
dustrial change  the  community  owes 
the  right  of  an  escape  from  the  distress 
of  it.  It  need  not  be  a  moiety  doled 
out.  It  need  not  be  the  opportunity  for 
a  carefree  sail  down  life's  stream.  It 
must  be  a  mitigation  of  the  black  as- 
perities brought  on  by  no  fault  of  the 
worker.  It  need  only  be  a  provision 
against  crisis  times.  It  must  be  an  op- 
portunity measured  out  in  justice.  It 
is  only  the  intent  here  to  discuss  a  prin- 
ciple. The  application  of  it  is  a  ques- 
tion of  detail  in  practical  sociology. 
The  civil  community  is  always  engaged 
in  socializing  large  units  of  wealth  in 

43 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

roadways,  and  schools,  and  other  build- 
ings, and  parks  and  playgrounds,  and 
in  all  kinds  of  public  utilities.  These 
could  be  undertaken  on  a  vaster  scale 
at  a  minimum  wage,  and  those  who 
make  use  of  the  opportunity  of  the  earn- 
ing could  justly  have  the  credit  of  a 
contribution  to  the  public  weal.  There 
might  also  be  a  social  supervision  of 
the  distribution  of  labor,  both  in  degree 
and  in  kind.  A  shift  of  workmen  from 
place  to  place  is  feasible.  The  expense 
of  the  transfer  could  be  made  to  relieve 
congestion  and  to  supply  shortage. 
Whatever  is  required  to  bring  it  to  pass, 
let  this  great  country  lay  at  the  door 
of  every  man  the  actual  opportunity  for 
bread  and  a  fire  and  civilized  conditions. 


44 


IV 

THE  COMMUNITY  AND  THE 

CLASSES 

Robinson  Crusoe  had  a  whole  is- 
land to  himself.  Nobody  was  near  to 
invade  his  rights.  There  was  no  chance 
for  him  to  interfere  with  others.  He 
was  in  a  distressful  state  of  unlimited 
freedom.  He  was  a  shifty  slave  to  un- 
related living.  But  he  got  away  at  the 
first  opportunity.  The  struggles  we 
have  with  our  human  surroundings  are 
never  so  great  as  would  be  our  incon- 
veniences and  vexations  if  we  were 
naked-handed  and  obliged  to  make  our 
way  with  the  very  best  the  raw  values 
of  nature  could  afford. 

The  validity  of  the  yielded  will  to 
the  social  rule  lies  in  the  fact  that  in 
such  a  transaction  we  make  a  good  ex- 

45 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

change.  We  compound  our  duty,  our 
service,  our  obedience.  We  get  in  re- 
turn an  enrichment  of  rights  and  ad- 
vantages. By  so  much  are  the  personal 
will  and  the  social  will  complemental. 
This  is  why  any  life  invested  in  com- 
munity values  is  a  rich  life.  With  every 
soldier  in  France  to  die  is  gain.  Any 
act  of  service  to  the  pubhc  has  in  it  the 
full  measure  of  personal  benefit — if  not 
to  the  one  who  gives  it,  then  to  others. 
Self-forgetfulness  for  the  common  weal 
is  everywhere  esteemed  of  great  merit. 
When  it  is  so  evident  that  we  cannot 
live  anywhere  without  society,  it  is 
madness  to  bring  damage  to  it  by  any 
act  of  our  own.  Reason  ought  to  impel 
human  action  with  at  least  as  much 
certainty  of  direction  as  instinct  does 
among  animals  and  insects.  The  gre- 
garious and  company-loving  animals 
are  always  the  more  prosperous.  A 
honeybee  among  the  flowers  seldom 
stings  when  it  can  escape.  When  the 
hive  is  attacked  it  reaches  the  stinging 
46 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

point  instantly,  and  that  too  when  to 
use  the  sting  is  always  death  to  itself. 
The  colony  life  is  the  higher  life  there 
because  it  is  absolutely  essential  to  the 
existence  of  each  insect. 

We  cannot  act  or  live  normally  ex- 
cept as  we  are  related  to  the  component 
community  units.  The  insular  life  for 
brief  moments  may  be  counted  a  luxury. 
There  is  a  kind  of  poetry  in  solitude 
unless  we  pursue  it  too  intently.  Oc- 
casionally we  enjoy  the  privilege  of 
being  let  alone.  These  luxuries  are  ht- 
tle  holidays  which  we  take,  away  from 
the  surfeit  and  noise  of  even  good  com- 
pany. The  rule  is,  the  more  we  mix 
and  have  to  do  with  our  fellows  the 
more  we  hve.  Associative  interests  are 
not  antagonistic  to  the  individual  when 
rightly  balanced.  Biologically  the 
unities  are  at  the  bottom.  All  the 
deeper  interests  of  the  hmnan  race  are 
the  same  interests.  Wherever  the  plain 
old  moralities  are  set  to  work,  obliga- 
tions and  rights  are  set  over  against 
47 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

each  other  to  work  for  the  peace  of  so- 
ciety, which  translates  itself  always  into 
the  welfare  of  the  individual.  When  it 
is  remembered  that  the  higher  advan- 
tages of  civilized  living,  as  well  as  many 
of  the  necessities  of  life,  are  actual  so- 
cial contributions,  private-mindedness 
will  appear  plainly  to  be  shortsighted- 
ness. When  those  of  lawful  age  take 
the  oath  of  allegiance  to  the  community 
rule  of  hving,  it  ought  to  be  hke  a  stake 
driven  down  to  stay.  The  law  to  which 
sworn  fealty  is  given  is  supposed  to 
embody  the  elements  of  pohtical  justice 
long  since  tried  out  by  experience. 
This  law,  the  accretion  of  generations, 
becomes  the  distilled  pohtical  logic  of 
history,  and  is  not  to  be  set  aside  by 
any  individual  judgment  whatever. 
Those  who  do  not  like  the  political  rule 
under  which  they  hve  ought  not  to  have 
sworn  in  under  it.  On  this  planet  yet 
there  is  opportunity  for  various  choices, 
but  the  obligation  of  fealty  follows  the 
choice.  Against  the  individual  the  law 
48 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

of  the  land  stands  at  all  times.  That 
little  affected  overplay  of  the  super- 
iority of  the  personal  conscience  over 
the  law  of  the  land  is  often  no  more 
than  a  mixture  of  self-conceit  and  self- 
will. 

That  which  is  occasionally  granted 
as  a  deference  to  conscience,  if  granted 
to  all,  would  disintegrate  the  social  bond 
itself.    The  law  may  not  be  perfection, 
but  its  integrities  are  one  with  the  con- 
tinuance of  the   social  order.     There 
cannot  be  just  scruples  against  the  fair 
and  open   covenant.     The   conscience 
which  breaks  with  the  covenant  it  takes 
is  not  hkely  to  be  one  hundred  per  cent 
in  any  special  direction.     It  is  better 
to  suffer,  or  even  to  die  under  the  civil 
rule  than  to  dispute  its  authority,  be- 
cause the  authority  broken  means  no 
rule  for  anybody.    An  individual  con- 
,«^cience  is  hardly  authorized  to  bring 
about    a    remediless    social    confusion. 
The  law  may  not  measure  out  to  men  at 
all  times  an  infalhble  justice,  but  the 
49 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

reverse  of  it  is  absolute  individualism, 
which  is  the  defeat  of  all  civil  coordina- 
tions whatever.  The  judicial  and  execu- 
tive administration  under  the  law  as 
it  exists  must  always  stand.  Respect 
for  and  obedience  to  the  law  is  the 
highest  duty  of  citizenship. 

This  principle  applies  with  equal 
force  to  classes  or  bodies  of  citizens. 
Numbers  do  not  count  except  as  they 
constitute  a  majority  expressed  under 
the  modes  which  the  community  has 
provided  for  itself.  Class  resistance  to 
the  common  law  is  as  disloyal  as  per- 
sonal resistance,  and  much  more  mis- 
chievous. Those  who  in  concert  make 
up  a  class  obstruction  have  each  pre- 
viously taken  the  community  oath,  and 
now  by  concert  of  understanding  they 
buttress  one  another  against  a  social 
principle,  the  validity  of  which  is  not 
weakened  by  numbers.  In  the  clash  of 
industrial  competitions  this  primaiy  so- 
cial essential  tends  to  get  out  of  view. 
Perfectly  honest  toilers  often  get 
50 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

grooved — immersed — submerged,  by 
the  continuous  years  of  hard  working 
conditions.  Their  beloved  country  ap- 
pears not  to  have  come  to  their  rehef, 
and  they  begin  to  think  of  it  as  not  a 
desperately  sacred  thing.  Whatever 
the  issue,  community  loyalty  must  not 
be  subordinated  to  class  loyalty.  Any 
appeal  to  class  consciousness  is  of  that 
nature.  The  tendency  has  in  it  a  peril. 
The  sun  gets  to  rising  and  setting  over 
one's  home  hill.  The  group  spirit  comes 
to  be  first  over  the  common  patriotism, 
and  it  takes  the  place  of  the  voice  which 
every  citizen  has  pledged  to  obey.  It 
is  true  that  the  members  of  a  group 
may  become  the  victims  of  an  injus- 
tice; and  it  is  also  true  that  they  may 
go  about  the  redress  of  it  in  the  wrong 
way.  The  method  of  the  redress  may 
be  as  reprehensible  as  the  injustice  it- 
self. If  society  endures,  where  its  law 
is  not  obeyed  willingly,  it  must  assume 
the  power  of  coercion  in  the  enforcement 
of  that  law.  There  is  no  alternative. 
51 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

The  sovereignty  of  the  common  law  is 
everything. 

Bodies  of  men  may  lawfully  act  to- 
gether, and  may  make  for  themselves 
certain  centers  of  economic  endeavor, 
but  they  must  conform  to  the  strictures 
which  society  in  general  places  over 
them,  and  for  the  very  good  reason  that 
the  general  welfare  is  of  greater  sig- 
nificance than  any  particular  welfare, 
or  any  group  welfare,  even  if  it  were 
possible  in  a  just  society  for  the  two 
to  come  into  conflict. 

Large  corporate  investments  have 
often  shown  an  intent  to  get  the  largest 
possible  profit,  in  disregard  of  the  hu- 
manistic appeals.  Technically  the  law 
may  be  obeyed.  Business  is  business. 
A  corporation  is  impersonal.  The 
pound  of  flesh  may  be  taken  and  the 
pious  incorporators  may  stay  out  from 
under.  Corporate  capital  in  recent  years 
feels  the  revolt  of  public  opinion 
against  the  vicious  fallacy  that  corpo- 
rate wealth  may  be  justly  cut  away 
52 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

from  those  who  manage  it.  Public 
opinion  begins  to  demand  that  wealth 
used  in  the  industries  shall  relate  itself 
personally.  Managers  of  large  con- 
cerns are  coming  to  see  that  if  their 
business  prospers,  they  must  make 
terms  with  public  sentiment.  Capital 
is  about  to  be  stopped  from  becoming 
an  Achilles  heel.  There  is  a  social  in- 
vestment in  any  corporation  because 
it  cannot  exist  without  society.  Public 
opinion  also  puts  its  ban  on  the  un- 
social features  of  working  organiza- 
tions. Where  special  interests  become 
careless  of  general  interests,  where  the 
will  of  the  few  comes  to  cross  purposes 
with  the  rights  of  the  many,  the  democ- 
racy rightfully  steps  in  to  take  a  hand. 
Concert  of  action  as  an  object  of  the 
organization  is  always  allowable  within 
the  limits  of  the  law,  but  it  must  not 
dictate  terms  to  the  larger  body,  under 
the  plea  that  it  can  right  its  own 
wrongs  if  let  alone.   The  spirit  of  that 

is    unsocial — feudalistic.      The    class 
53 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

sentiment — ^the  class  feeling — in  itself 
considered,  cannot  be  counted  an  in- 
fraction of  the  laws  of  human  society. 
Human  pursuits  have  a  differential 
quite  natural.  Men  of  like  pursuits 
are  drawn  together  by  like  feelings  and 
like  ideas,  and  their  guild  associations 
are  profitable  to  themselves.  There  is 
no  help  in  economic  society  for  that 
which  produces  the  classes,  and  they 
must  learn  to  live  together  on  terms  of 
fairness.  Any  demand  of  a  class  in 
which  other  classes  are  expected  to  take 
care  of  themselves  is  divisive  in  its  in- 
ception. Any  class  has  the  right  to 
weigh  its  claims  against  the  claims  of 
other  classes — and  to  make  the  social 
appeal;  but  when  it  begins  to  assert 
power  at  the  point  of  the  claim,  the 
class  war  begins.  A  show  of  reason  is 
alwaj^s  better  than  a  show  of  power. 
Power  has  a  threat.  Reason  has  an  ap- 
peal. Power,  as  such,  is  obhged  to 
crouch  finally.  Nothing  on  this  earth, 
in  the  last  resort,  is  held  by  power.  The 
64 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

temper  of  it  is  to  awaken  antagonism, 
and  the  antagonism  will  translate  itself 
into  action  finally.  The  assertion  of 
power  is  an  insult  to  the  sense  of  human 
fairness.  The  time  is  here  for  the 
enactment  of  a  stringent  law  to  hinder 
the  possibility  of  any  number  of  men  to 
manipulate  grain  or  any  necessary 
product  to  the  detriment  of  the  masses. 
There  must  not  be  the  investment  of 
a  power  anywhere  which  compels  the 
butter  of  a  poor  child's  bread  to  be 
spread  any  thinner. 

Whenever  a  class  refuses  to  recog- 
nize the  community  obligations  along- 
side of  its  special  interests,  it  will  find 
human  society  resentful  directly.  If 
it  is  not  willing  to  make  fair  concessions 
where  economic  interests  for  the  time 
clash,  then  it  is  not  willing  to  consider 
the  needs  of  other  men,  and  it  has  come 
to  the  end  of  reason.  Justice  in  human 
society  must  remain  diffusive.  It  must 
reach  the  last  poor  man  on  the  outer 

rim  of  the  social  bestowals,  the  last 
65 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

little  girl  on  her  way  to  school.  The 
little  girl  must  have  an  opportunity  for 
her  life  equal  to  any.  She  must  have 
right  of  way  for  the  best  she  can  do 
for  herself  against  the  corporate  mil- 
lions, and  against  the  federated  thou- 
sands of  men  who  undertake  to  force 
general  society  to  make  a  contribution 
to  their  interests  unfairly.  The  govern- 
ment must  have  no  coordinates  with  it- 
self. Combines  of  money  or  combines  of 
persons  should  not  weigh  a  farthing  in 
the  general  administration  of  affairs. 
An  extra  cent  paid  on  the  school  girl's 
stockings  because  of  any  combine  is  an 
unjust  tribute.  She  is  punished  because 
she  is  not  able  to  bring  counter  pressure 
to  bear  in  her  own  interest.  At  this 
point  in  society  the  individual  may  be 
always  at  the  mercy  of  the  classes.  So- 
ciety, and  not  the  classes,  is  engaged  in 
the  business  of  administering  equal  jus- 
tice. If  it  has  to  act  coordinately  with 
the  classes  it  becomes  impotent.  Then 
as  a  sjonbol  of  justice  it  is  a  travesty. 
56 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

To  get  on  in  the  world,  then,  will  be 
a  favor  to  the  individual  and  not  a 
right.  What  kind  of  civil  rule  is 
that? 

The  common  interests  of  men  have 
now  become  of  tremendous  magnitude. 
More  things  are  being  held  in  common 
than  ever  before.  The  common  inter- 
est has  come  to  mean  the  individual 
right.  Individuals  may  not  become 
enemies  therefore.  Separate  neighbor- 
hoods may  not  fence  themselves  off  into 
belligerent  camps.  Both  the  barbar- 
isms of  personal  strife  and  the  selfish 
feudahsms  of  class  and  clan  must  take 
oath  to  obey  an  empire  of  law,  to  the 
end  that  the  equities  of  life  may  be 
conferred  on  the  man  of  low  degree. 
Group-mindedness  in  citizenship  is 
only  private-mindedness  raised  to  the 
n*''  power.  There  must  be  no  divided 
allegiances,  no  exclusive  pro-class 
fealty,  no  independencies  of  law  for 
anybody  if  society  is  to  endure. 
67 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

I  refer  here  to  the  classes  as  they  are 
related  to  the  government  under  which 
they  exist  and  whose  institutions  make 
it  possible  for  them  to  express  them- 
selves in  such  differentials  of  value. 
Those  engaged  in  the  same  pursuit 
may  rightfully  organize.  They  get  ac- 
quainted. They  improve  themselves 
as  workmen.  They  come  to  a  common 
understanding.  They  cultivate  among 
themselves  the  fraternal  spirit.  They 
may  have  for  each  other  an  added  at- 
tachment for  the  same  reason  that  a 
man  ought  to  love  his  wife  above  his 
regard  for  other  women.  They  may  act 
in  concert  in  collective  contracts.  They 
may,  as  a  body,  stand  for  just  working 
conditions,  and  for  wages  which  mean 
a  fair  share  of  the  profits  of  production. 
They  may  bring  those  who  manage 
capital  to  a  recognition  of  the  rights  of 
human  beings  in  all  the  cases  where 
they  have  become  dead  to  them.  There 
is  certainly  a  justifiable  group  interest. 

Industry  has  this  kind  of  natural  par- 
58 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

ticularization  in  it.  Modern  tendencies 
are  toward  having  about  as  many 
classes  as  there  are  pursuits. 

These  pages  stand  only  against  the 
overaccent,  against  an  overlordship 
which  defeats  the  generalizations  of  law. 
The  majority  is  not  obsessed  with  a 
class  consciousness.  Children  are  not. 
Housewives  and  mothers  are  not.  Many 
people  of  all  work  are  not.  Farmers 
are  not.  These  all  have  the  marks  of 
their  work  on  them.  In  a  limited  sense 
they  live  the  insular  life — ^they  go 
straight,  and  obey  the  law.  And  they 
are  the  equals  of  any.  Their  right  to 
life,  liberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happi- 
ness is  a  constitutional  guarantee, 
against  which  no  special  interest  may 
have  the  unsocial  power  of  discrimina- 
tion. That  law.  of  liberty  is  of  equal 
value  to  those  wha  compose  the  classes, 
and  gets  not  in  their  way  except  at  the 
point  where  they  are  inclined  to  put 
the  power  of  a  thousand  against  one, 
and  to  settle  an  issue  without  any  ap- 
59 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

peal  to  the  law  of  righteousness  in- 
volved. 

When  Louis  XVI  came  to  the 
throne  of  France  he  found  what  his 
grandfather  had  left  him — an  abandon 
of  life  which  had  for  its  shibboleth, 
"After  us  the  deluge."  He  made  the 
experiment  of  calling  into  the  counsels 
of  the  government,  as  a  last  resort, 
representatives  of  the  classes.  He  evi- 
dently had  the  evil  intent  to  pit  them 
one  against  another.  When  three  dogs 
want  a  bone  and  two  of  them  get  into 
a  clash,  the  other  dog  gets  it.  The 
Commons  went  into  the  saddle  against 
the  Clergy  and  the  Nobles.  A  revolt 
against  the  old  order  was  soon  on.  The 
Bastile  was  stormed  and  taken,  and 
stable  government  was  at  an  end. 

The  Enghsh  government,  previous  to 
the  outbreak  of  the  present  war,  was 
in  the  grip  of  certain  radical  and  dan- 
gerous disintegrations.  The  threat  of 
rupture  was  in  the  air.  A  minority  who 
had  the  advantage  of  a  close  organiza- 
6a 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

tion  began  to  grow  lax  in  community- 
patriotism,  and  for  the  common  law, 
and  for  the  national  sovereignty.  That 
steady  adherence  of  the  English  people 
to  an  ordered  government  by  law — the 
richest  fruit  of  their  civilization — was 
threatened  with  a  breakdown  any  day. 
An  incurable  separateness  pervaded 
the  class  contentions.  And  if  an  out- 
side danger  had  not  cemented  the  war- 
ring masses,  God  only  knows  what 
might  have  happened.  But  the  quiet 
during  the  war  is  understood  to  be  only 
a  truce,  which  is  an  evil  omen.  It  may 
be  that  the  measureless  chastening  all 
the  people  now  know  will  make  them 
ashamed  to  nurse  such  a  strife  of  fac- 
tions. It  may  be  that  the  men  back 
from  the  trenches,  where  all  kinds  of 
blood  get  mixed  and  run  down  the 
streams  into  the  sea,  will  yet  have  a 
care  for  the  nation's  life,  and  will  be 
able  to  coerce  the  lesser  factions,  who 
have  shown  a  temper  to  throw  the  most 
precious  principles  away  with  a  flout. 

61 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

It  is  a  little  difficult  in  a  provincial 
strife  for  a  people  to  see  that  a  birth- 
right is  worth  more  than  a  mess  of  pot- 
tage. The  spirit  which  prompts  men 
to  seize  what  they  can  for  their  class 
inconsiderately  is  born  partly  of  igno- 
rance. They  would  not  do  so  if  they 
had  the  larger  vision,  if  they  understood 
just  how  industrial  society  goes  to- 
gether, and  what  the  elements  of  its 
prosperity  are.  It  is  not  because  they 
have  the  evil  intent,  but  because  they 
fail  to  see  the  dependence  of  any  class 
pursuit  on  all  other  class  pursuits. 
They  do  not  see  the  larger  coordina- 
tions of  this  busy  world  clearly  enough 
to  care  for  them,  and  so  it  comes  about 
that  they  are  not  good  friends  to  them- 
selves. 

The  ordered  life  of  a  nation  begins 
to  distintegrate  when  its  center  of 
authority  begins  to  break  down.  That 
authority  breaks  when  class  interests 
are  brought  up  into  its  executive  cen- 
ters. When  any  class  may  have  a  con- 
62 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

troversy  with  the  government,  the 
rights  of  those  who  do  not  belong  to 
that  class  are  in  jeopardy.  The 
stability  of  democratic  institutions 
rests  on  the  principle  of  fair  play  all 
around.  Class  interests  are  admissible, 
if  they  are  wilhng  to  grant  the  rights 
for  which  they  contend.  In  all  indus- 
trial dispute  the  doctrine  of  the  uni- 
versal right  must  emerge.  In  all  emer- 
gencies the  welfare  of  the  general  pub- 
lic must  be  first.  Private  constitu- 
tional rights  must  be  preserved;  pri- 
vate interests  and  wishes  must  not  be 
made  first  over  the  pubhc  interest. 
Those  who  set  themselves  against  the 
order  of  human  society  become  bad 
citizens.  A  notorious  criminal  who  was 
trying  to  make  class  loyalty  condone 
for  the  blackest  crimes  said  he  was  will- 
ing to  take  his  punishment  for  the  sake 
of  the  cause.  He  was  bhnded  by  his 
own  low  instincts.  No  good  cause  on 
earth  connects  itself  with  his  act.  The 
group   understanding  which   supports 

63 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

such  a  man  is  either  obtuse  or  criminal. 
The  masses  of  men  have  toward  it  only 
detestation. 

I  have  the  feeling  that  the  temper 
which  I  here  interpret  is  more  than  a 
fly  in  the  ointment.  The  only  cure  for 
it  I  see  is  a  stronger  faith  in  the  neces- 
sities of  an  ordered  coherence  of  gov- 
ernment by  law  to  hold  all  diverse  in- 
terests together  under  the  common  rule 
until  an  injustice  can  be  righted  in  an 
orderly  way.  It  is  bad  blood  and  bad 
policy  also  to  break  with  that  which  is 
of  political  method,  for  the  reason  that 
an  industrial  injustice  cannot  be 
remedied  instantly. 

Among  the  masses  a  sense  of  the 
unity  and  significance  of  the  civil  state 
is  weakening.  A  sense  of  the  worth  of 
experience  in  the  making  of  law  and 
of  the  importance  of  its  execution  is 
weakening  also.  The  wholeness  of  the 
country's  affairs  tends  to  get  out  of  the 
view  of  the  common  man.  Not  much 
wonder,  for  the  wholeness  of  things 
64 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

now  is  not  to  be  understood  by  anybody. 
But  it  is  possible  for  an  intelligent  man 
to  get  his  bearings  as  an  elector.  He 
has  a  chance  to  know  about  his  neigh- 
bor's interests  as  well  as  his  own.  To 
live  and  let  live,  the  first  lesson  of  jus- 
tice, he  is  able  to  learn.  He  ought  to 
have  sense  enough  to  quit  praying  for 
himself  and  his  wife  and  his  son  John. 
He  ought  to  be  able  to  see  that  if  he 
owned  the  whole  country,  he  would  not 
be  able  to  manage  it  nearly  so  well  as  it 
is  being  managed  now  in  his  own  inter- 
est. He  gets  that  now  for  which  he 
does  not  toil,  neither  does  he  spin.  In  a 
country  like  this  he  is  born  rich,  and 
he  ought  not  to  kick  up  such  a  muss, 
when,  in  the  game  of  grab-and-get  he 
misses  his  grab.  When  it  is  in  any 
man's  mind  to  think  the  whole  game  of 
life  consists  in  making  things  come  his 
way,  he  is  utterly  lost  to  his  associative 
obligations.  He  is  then  ready  for  war 
if  the  law  of  the  crowd  obliterates  his 
choices.  He  is  averse  to  fitting  himself 
65 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

into  the  massed  interests  of  the  people 
about  him.  He  is  a  biological  unity  in 
spite  of  himself — a  little  builder  worm 
leaving  a  small  deposit  for  the  ages  to 
inherit — but  he  thinks  of  that  as  so 
much  loss.  He  is  a  fastened-down 
man.  Some  great  establishment  may 
have  fitted  him  into  a  treadmill,  with 
no  stipulation  for  a  day  off.  He  may 
have  used  a  monkey  wrench  for  ten 
years  without  a  single  Sunday  with  his 
family.  His  brain  is  then  functioned 
to  the  use  of  a  single  tool.  He  is  an 
animated  monkey  wrench.  Is  it  his 
fault  or  his  virtue?  The  kind  of  world 
we  live  in,  the  degree  of  progress  to 
which  we  have  attained,  have  in  them 
this  under-pull  for  the  countless  thou- 
sands. And  the  only  remedy  is  a  radi- 
cal reconstruction  of  life's  viewpoint. 
Unless  the  humanities  intervene  there 
is  positively  no  hope. 

The   ideals    of   the    street   and   the 
market  place  are  destructive  to  those  who 

work  there.  It  is  because  business  is  war 
66 


COMMUNITY  AND  CLASSES 

that  it  needs  to  be  infused  with  a  new 
temper  from  the  bottom.  The  issue  is 
very  distinctly  moral.  Nothing  else 
matters  as  a  remedy.  Justice  enthrones 
itself  in  the  reahn  of  spirit.  Methods 
are  secondary.  They  adjust  themselves 
to  a  situation  when  there  is  anything 
doing.  The  larger  intelligence,  the 
common  righteousness,  the  spirit  of 
fraternity — if  we  turn  to  these  to  stay 
with  them,  they  will  soon  have  a  new 
world  to  their  credit.  Intelligence, 
righteousness,  fraternity — ^the  matter  of 
what  these  are  in  their  applications  to 
life,  comes  up  for  discussion,  and  makes 
up  the  endless  issue  in  thought,  but 
when  we  are  held  by  them  in  principle 
we  come  from  the  circumference  to  the 
heart  and  center  of  the  human  sphere. 
Intelligence  will  always  be  limited  and 
partial,  morality  will  always  be  more  or 
less  imperfect,  the  fraternity  will  be 
humanistic  and  not  absolute,  but  life's 
viewpoint,  under  the  pull  of  them  will 
be  shifted  from  its  present  channeled 
67 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

fatalistic  running  into  the  broader  cur- 
rents where  culture  and  ethics  and  reli- 
gion have  converged  to  place  securely 
in  control  the  unitary  values  of  human 
history. 


68 


y. 


THE  ECONOMIC  SIDE  OF 
SOCIALISM 

About  the  greatest  and  fairest  thing 
which  may  be  said  of  the  incongruities 
of  modern  Sociahsm,  is  that  they  make 
up  a  protest  against  the  tragedy  of  Hv- 
ing.  It  has  the  good  intention  in  larger 
degree  than  the  practical  sagacity.  It 
has  been  proved  safe  for  the  democracy 
to  take  up  into  its  structure  the  right 
of  opportunity  for  social  experiments 
to  give  to  themselves  self-expression 
under  existing  law.  All  peaceable  so- 
cial theories  among  a  free  people  have 
a  right  to  themselves,  so  long  as  they 
do  not  run  at  cross  currents  to  the  ac- 
cepted ethic  of  civil  living.  The  quick- 
est ending  of  an  unsound  radicalism  is 
its  trial.  If  there  is  a  short  cut  to  the 
millennium,  let  those  who  think  they 
69 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

know  the  way  go  through  and  return 
and  report,  if  they  are  wilhng  to  pay 
their  own  expenses.  Those  who  think 
they  are  in  possession  of  the  superior 
social  ideals  have  room  enough  under 
existing  laws  to  make  them  valid  in  ap- 
phcation.  There  is  always  some  little 
corner  where  a  new  thing  may  be  tried 
out  without  disturbing  anybody;  and 
if  it  comes  to  have  set  characteristics, 
and  does  not  break  back,  and  the  human 
life  flourishes  under  it,  the  future  for 
it,  among  a  free  people,  ought  to  be  an 
open  highway.  A  horse  may  not  be 
worth  what  the  owner  asks  for  him,  and 
yet  he  may  have  some  good  points,  and 
the  owner  may  be  safely  allowed  to  keep 
him  and  wear  him  out.  I  say  this  much 
to  those  who  go  about  with  a  worked- 
out  social  theory  which  they  have  never 
tried,  and  who  promise  a  paradise  at 
the  end  of  it. 

It  is  untenable  to  condemn  in  toto 
any  great  and  persistent  propaganda. 
Socialism  in  the  world,  until  now,  has 
70 


SOCIALISM 

been  a  spirit  in  the  air  more  than  any- 
thing else.  Under  many  theories, 
opinions,  doctrines,  philosophies,  the 
world  has  a  kind  of  hodgepodge — which 
means  that  it  lacks  in  the  unitary  un- 
derstandings of  itself.  The  temper  of 
it  is  more  consistent  than  its  thinking. 
Its  dreams  are  for  the  happiness  of  all, 
which  by  so  much  puts  it  in  sympathy 
with  all  the  good  of  all  the  ages.  It 
stands  for  the  uplift  of  the  downmost 
man,  and  di'aws  him  to  itself  like  a  mag- 
net. It  arrays  itself  against  the  in- 
equalities of  life  without  taking  great 
account  of  the  unequal  qualities  of  life. 
It  has  stood  much  for  the  absurd  fail- 
ure and  monotony  of  a  common  larder. 
It  has  pointed  out  the  defects  of  the 
established  order  which  nearly  every- 
body sees.  And  its  advances  in  recent 
years  have  been  very  great.  And  its 
general  ideas  have  come  to  such  open 
significance  as  to  demand  for  them- 
selves some  discriminate  and  analytic 
understanding. 

71 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

We  discuss  only  in  brief  here  its  eco- 
nomic features,  and  for  the  reason  that 
the  cult  of  it  stands  on  the  breadhne 
as  a  first  point  of  advantage.  That 
fact  relates  it  to  human  toil  and  its  con- 
sequences. 

In  the  earlier  half  of  the  last  century 
quite  a  number  of  communistic  experi- 
ments were  put  in  operation  in  the 
United  States.  The  record  which  they 
made,  and  the  literature  they  left,  is 
now  of  distinct  intellectual  interest  to 
all  students  of  social  affairs.  Brook 
Farm,  New  Harmony,  The  Rappite 
Fathers,  The  Fourier,  and  Brisbane 
societies,  and  others,  all  to  the  number 
of  forty  or  more,  made  at  the  time  a 
distinct  impression  on  American  social 
thought,  and  so  they  could  not  have 
helped  leaving  certain  currents  of  in- 
fluence on  the  life  of  the  nation.  Cer- 
tainly, on  the  whole,  they  were  valuable 
experiences  in  social  living.  They  were 
peaceable — high-visioned,  creative,  ideal- 
istic. They  sought  the  less  distressful 
72 


SOCIALISM 

— the  better  life.    They  proposed  to  in- 
graft an  order  of  hving  to  take  the  place 
of  that  which  they  felt  to  be  imperfect 
and  unsound.     The  American  people 
were  good-humored  toward  these  testers 
of  a  new  way.    The  members  of  these 
bodies  showed  among  themselves,  and 
toward  others,  no  special  enmity.  They 
were  not  self-assertive  in  an  unpleasant 
way.     They  had  no  vindictiveness,  no 
revolutionary  intent.     They  were  well 
set  as  to  location,  and  they  had  a  fair 
chance.    They  did  not  succeed,  because 
human   nature   among   them   did   not 
measure  up  to  their  ideals.    Theirs  was 
a  mild-mannered  philosophy  which  un- 
dertook to  get  rid  of  self-seeking  and 
laziness  and  dishonesty  by  destroying 
the  motives  to  these  sins.     If  all  are 
supplied  in  equal  measure,  if  want  is 
unknown,  if  there  are  no  rich  and  no 
poor,  and  no  one  in  want,  no  sickness 
unattended,    and    all    normal    desires 
gratified,  everybody  ought  to  be  good 
and  happy.    The  sweet  reasonableness 
73 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

of  it  attracted  many  fine  minds.  Haw- 
thorne, and  Horace  Greeley,  and  scores 
of  others  hke  them  were  infatuated  for 
a  time.  They  preached  a  broadly  hu- 
mane social  gospel.  These  organiza- 
tions were  amazingly  prosperous  for  a 
time.  Their  reports  from  themselves 
read  like  good  news  sent  home  from  a 
fisherman's  camp.  Each  self-nucleated 
center  became  a  rugged  school  of  the 
impractical.  Human  nature  would  not 
come  to  the  scratch.  Those  who  ad- 
mitted all  comers  began  to  disintegrate 
almost  immediately.  Those  who  se- 
lected their  material  created  a  company 
of  kindred  souls,  and  continued  for 
years ;  but  they  finally  saw  that  a  selec- 
tive human  society  was  on  its  face  a 
social  defeat.  It  contradicted  the  prin- 
ciple of  universality.  The  lazy  ones 
would  impose  on  the  industrious.  The 
dishonest  and  the  immoral  entered 
among  them  and  gave  them  trouble. 
They  had  to  make  the  civil  society  from 
which  they  had  withdrawn  a  kind  of 
74 


SOCIALISM 

gehenna  gate  into  which  they  pitched 
their  human  refuse.  The  old  order  had 
to  take  and  handle  what  they  could  not 
use.  The  folk  who  made  up  these 
bodies  were  the  good  people  who,  by 
indirection,  cleared  the  air  of  some  so- 
cial mists.  They  were  httle  fairy  social 
fabrics  which  served  the  purpose  of 
showing  how  not  to  do  it.  They  did 
not  master  the  stern  fact  which  faces 
any  community  hfe,  which  is  that  of 
making  provision  for  the  control  of  the 
scoundrel  who  proposes  to  take  the 
center  of  the  stage.  No  social  scheme 
will  ever  stand  which  is  builded  on  the 
faith  that  the  moral  integrities  are 
absolute  in  their  action.  It  is  true  that 
all  men  ought  to  be  honest,  and  it  is 
just  as  true  that  they  are  not.  A  hu- 
man society  without  provision  for  deal- 
ing with  the  socially  unfit  is  chimerical. 
It  will  have  its  terror  if  it  does  not  do 
something  with  its  wreckage.  The 
fallacy  of  these  earlier  experiments  was 
their  attempt  to  build  an  outer  struc- 
Y5 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

ture  fitted  to  take  care  of  all  comers. 
It  was  the  preconceived  superior  way. 
It  was  a  series  of  specializations  on  the 
superstructure.  It  was  a  scaffolding 
with  triggers  underneath. 

So  always  the  social  arrangement 
which  essays  to  take  the  rough  edges 
from  the  motives  to  exertion  fails.  It 
is  an  indolent  theory  which  proposes  to 
have  everything  standardized  in  order 
to  give  rehef  from  life's  brunt.  Equal 
economic  conditions  for  the  strong  and 
the  weak,  the  upright  and  the  vicious, 
blot  out  inherent  moral  distinctions. 
Diverse  capacities  cannot  be  made  to 
suffer  stratification.  To  provide  the 
living  conditions  which  the  most  ener- 
getic enjoy  for  those  of  vacuous  and  in- 
different hfe  is  to  send  the  whole  social 
body  downgrade.  Houses,  victuals, 
clothes,  workdays  all  regulated  will 
produce  a  paradise  of  drones.  Show 
me  my  life  ahead  provided  for  without 
care,  and  my  energies  are  clipped  that 
moment.  There  is  no  equitable  way  to 
76 


SOCIALISM 

take  the  whole  product  of  labor  and 
pass  it  out  as  we  do  at  a  picnic  dinner. 
Those  who  purpose  to  eat  and  not  to 
work  provoke  resentment  in  those  who 
stand  for  the  square  deal.  The  obliga- 
tion on  the  individual  to  be  a  producer 
of  some  kind  is  a  social  law  which  never 
rubs  out.  Whoever  has  nothing  to  ex- 
change in  the  barter  of  values  is  in  a 
bad  way.  The  bedridden  may  have 
smiles  to  give  to  the  nurses  and  keep 
even  in  that  way,  but  whoever  takes  in 
any  way  and  does  not  give  in  some  way 
is  a  pauper.  The  world's  toilers  and 
the  world's  do-nothings  cannot  live  in 
the  same  house  and  divide  even  at  the 
same  table.  In  fact,  their  relationships 
are  to-day  becoming  strained  even 
while  living  in  the  same  world. 

Socialism,  as  the  world  now  under- 
stands its  general  features,  has  made 
great  advance  from  these  primitive 
communistic  ideals.  It  has  become  a 
world- factor,  with  the  home  of  its 
propaganda  among  the  most  favored 
77 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

nations.  That  it  presents  about  as 
many  phases  as  there  are  minds  to  dis- 
cuss it  is  not  a  condemnatory  statement. 
The  same  may  be  said  of  Protestant- 
ism as  an  expression  of  the  Hfe  of  reh- 
gion.  The  fact  is  indeed  a  hindrance  to 
the  strongest  unified  self-assertion,  but 
at  the  same  time  it  is  a  natural  conse- 
quence of  a  discussion  where  the  human 
mind  is  a  free  force.  Its  general  idea 
seems  to  be  about  like  this :  The  govern- 
ment ought  to  perform  a  lot  of  func- 
tions for  the  individual  which  he  has 
heretofore  performed  for  himself,  and 
which,  in  the  stress  of  changes  in  in- 
dustrial circumstances,  he  is  no  longer 
able  to  do. 

It  would  be  difficult  to  fairly  locate 
responsibility  for  the  existence,  in  the 
modern  business  world,  of  a  number  of 
tendencies  which  have  placed  too  much 
of  the  world's  wealth  into  too  few 
hands,  and  while  certain  plain  advan- 
tages are  to  be  derived  from  massed 
capital  in  the  hands  of  individuals  and 
78 


SOCIALISM 

corporations,  it  has  brought  with  it  an 
extreme  distress  of  personal  hmitations. 
Workmen  become  fastened  to  their 
places.  They  become  subject  to  the  will 
of  the  employer.  The  shadows  always 
collect  about  a  fastened-down  man.  So- 
cialism works  in  these  shadows — it 
floods  this  twilight  with  iridescent 
dreams  of  life's  universal  well-being.  It 
starts  with  a  grievance  which  everybody 
knows  to  exist  and  about  which  every 
lover  of  his  kind  is  perplexed.  Is 
there  a  way  out  of  the  tangled  issue, 
which  does  not  deify  the  impractical? 
Is  there  a  movement  in  that  direction? 
In  both  the  business  world  and  in  the 
civil  administration  may  be  detected  a 
growing  conscience  toward  a  fairer  dis- 
tribution of  the  products  of  labor  and 
capital.  There  will  not  be  a  redistribu- 
tion except  as  the  military  exigencies  of 
the  war  contribute  to  that  end.  To  take 
from  the  haves  and  turn  over  to  the 
have-nots  is  the  short  cut  to  measureless 
infamies.  Property  values,  as  they  are 
79 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

now  held,  have  reached  their  standards 
under  the  laws  which  the  democracy  has 
made  for  itself,  and  a  shuffle  and  redis- 
tribution could  only  appear  through  the 
power  vested  somewhere  in  a  revolution. 
The  real  problem  is  to  right  that  which 
has  been  working  out  of  balance  to  pro- 
duce a  degree  of  power  where  it  ought 
not  to  exist.  Labor,  at  times,  while  it 
has  received  what  it  agreed  to  take,  has 
not  received  the  values  of  an  equivalent, 
and  the  conditions  of  work,  often,  have 
been  regardless  of  the  human  life  itself. 
The  industrial  development  has  been 
one-sided.  Evidences  of  an  unsocial 
accumulation  are  before  any  man's  eyes. 
It  is  the  plain  duty  of  citizenship  to 
secure  for  itself  protection  in  the  situa- 
tions and  cases  where  the  danger  lies. 

Still,  the  distribution  of  wealth  in 
America  is  the  most  satisfactory  the 
world  has  ever  known.  We  have  many 
millions  of  well-to-do  and  contented 
property  holders.  In  the  matter  of 
property  distribution  we  are  not  going 
80 


SOCIALISM 

to  the  bowwows.  Public  thought  has 
for  years  seriously  addressed  itself  to  a 
serious  question,  and  the  turning  tides 
are  already  apparent.  The  distributing 
factors  are  seen  at  work  in  several  direc- 
tions. And  they  are  not  in  the  line 
of  dangerously  drastic  social  action. 
Nearly  all  of  them  have  a  place  in  the 
natural  evolution  of  business  enterprise 
and  method.  Open  discussion  thrown 
into  the  daily  actions  of  men  modijfies 
their  movements  in  the  direction  of  what 
is  fair  and  right.  Let  any  man's  griev- 
ance be  made  an  open  book,  let  any  in- 
justice offer  its  challenge  before  the 
court  of  all  appeals,  and  while  the  ad- 
justment may  not  be  made  immediately, 
for  the  reason  that  the  voices  of  justice 
from  a  crowd  come  out  a  Httle  slowly, 
there  need  be  no  doubt  about  the  result, 
and  it  may  be  reached  without  storm  or 
Tvasteful  temper.  There  is  no  room  for 
the  rufous  hot-head,  no  place  for  class 
recrimination  and  strife,  no  place  for 
the  boycott  which  is  un-American  and 
81 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

cowardly,  no  place  for  organized  re- 
pression. 

Capitalist  centers  now  begin  to  recog- 
nize the  importance  of  a  distributed 
ownership  of  their  values.  Many  are 
giving  their  employees  stock  on  favor- 
able terms.  The  Pennsylvania  Rail- 
road System  now  boasts  that  its  bond- 
holders number  some  twenty  thousand. 
Other  large  concerns  are  voluntarily 
turning  back  to  their  employees  a  per- 
cent of  the  profits,  and  that  above  the 
daily  wage.  Others  are  distributing  the 
profits  in  an  extreme  wage  which  actu- 
ally capitalizes  each  employee.  Others 
carry  insurance  for  employees  above  the 
wage.  Large  numbers  provide  pensions 
for  old  age,  as  well  as  sick  benefits.  In 
1916  the  free  offerings  of  the  American 
people  in  pubHc  gifts  summed  up  more 
than  a  billion  dollars.  We  are  in  the 
afternoon  of  the  day  of  predatory 
wealth. 

The  sixteenth  amendment  to  the 
United  States  Constitution  puts  a 
82 


SOCIALISM 

graduated  tax  on  incomes — and  the 
method  of  it  is  to  increase  the  percent- 
age as  the  income  is  greater.  It  is  a  na- 
tional movement  in  the  direction  of  dis- 
tribution. The  Supreme  Court  lately 
has  confirmed  the  validity  of  the  work- 
men's compensation  acts  of  the  various 
States — even  that  of  Washington,  in 
which  compensation  in  part  is  taken  out 
of  the  public  treasury,  after  the  manner 
of  the  insurance  act  of  England. 

But  the  most  significant  movement  in 
the  direction  of  the  socialization  of 
property  values  may  be  found  in  the 
universally  accepted  principle  of  the 
taxation  of  property  for  public  uses. 
The  intent  is  to  provide  advantage 
which  may  be  appropriated  by  the  rich 
and  poor  alike,  and  which  is  of  no  less 
value  to  the  rich  because  the  poor  get 
from  it  values  equal  to  any.  It  means 
an  increase  in  the  amenities  of  associa- 
tive living  and  enjoyment  of  the  same 
thing  by  each  citizen  at  a  rate  which 
the  poor  can  afford. 
83 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

Highways,  bridges,  pavements, 
sewerage,  sanitation,  parks,  drinking 
fountains,  water  systems,  city  lighting, 
museums,  libraries,  hospitals,  school- 
books,  schools,  churches,  technical  insti- 
tutes, the  postal  service,  postal  savings 
banks,  federal  banking,  parcel  post, 
vocational  training,  county  provision 
for  the  poor,  boards  of  health,  educa- 
tion endowments,  state  benevolent  in- 
stitutions, institutions  of  special  re- 
search— these  are  all  actually  socialistic 
in  the  true  sense.  It  is  value  taken  from 
those  who  have  it  and  applied  to  the 
pubhc  benefit.  It  is  the  universaliza- 
tion  of  value.  It  is  sound  policy.  It  is 
sound  business.  It  is  sound  politics.  It 
is  sound  philanthropy.  It  is  sound 
democracy.  It  is  the  only  sound  social- 
ism. 

And  the  end  is  not  yet.  The  move- 
ment toward  more  things  in  common 
is  in  its  beginning  stages.  The  outlook 
is  toward  the  telephone  and  telegraph 
service,    railroads,    street    cars,    inter- 

84 


SOCIALISM 

urban  lines,  water  and  lighting  facili- 
ties.      Vast     government     ownership 
means  vast  government  regulation,  and 
that  may  have  in  it  danger   for  the 
democracy.     But  it  has  become  ques- 
tionable in  political  ethics  if  any  pubhc 
utihty  ought  to  furnish  to  any  individ- 
ual any  degree  of  profit.   The  monop- 
oly of  a  public  utility  is  in  its  nature 
unsocial.     Public  ownership  ought  to 
mean  the  whole  service  at  cost  to  the 
public.    It  is  a  step  in  the  direction  of 
the  distribution  of  values.     Its  success 
would  depend  on  the  honesty  of  the 
political  administration.    That  particu- 
lar risk  makes  it  of  doubtful  expediency. 
It  may  be  safely  said,  however,  that  we 
are  in  a  slow  but  sure  movement  in  the 
direction  of  the  extension  of  the  power 
of  government,  to  increase  the  number 
and  extent  of  social  advantages,  to  reach 
with  the  benefits  of  civilized  society  the 
downmost   man   in   all  out-of-the-way 
places.    It  has  in  it  also  the  sound  logic 
of  advance  by  test  and  experiment.  This 
85 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

definite  movement  in  socialism — old  and 
tried — ought  not  to  be  deflected.  If  the 
individual  under  it  is  called  on  to  make 
larger  sacrifices  of  personal  holding,  it 
will  bring  about  so  many  and  great  com- 
mon advantages,  that  large  private 
wealth  will  not  be  needed  in  order  to 
enjoy  the  finest  results  of  progress  and 
culture. 

Nobody  claims  perfection  for  the 
established  ways  of  business  and  social 
betterment.  Methods  are  always  tenta- 
tive and  provisional,  and  are  subject  to 
improvement.  It  is  of  chiefest  concern 
that  the  community  life  of  the  world 
is  now  alive  to  the  interests  of  the  com- 
mon man.  He  must  have  a  secure  place 
and  a  satisfactory  time  for  himself  and 
those  dependent  on  him.  No  associa- 
tion is  worth  anything  which  crushes 
the  selfhood  of  the  citizen.  The  nabobs 
are  now  about  to  break  their  necks  try- 
ing to  get  into  the  ranks  of  the  com- 
moner. The  genius  in  finance  may  get 
to  be  of  so  low  standing  that  the  breed 
86 


SOCIALISM 

of  him  will  become  extinct.  We  are 
headed  for  a  democracy  of  labor.  And 
no  man  on  earth  knows  what  that  is  to 
be.  If  it  is  to  be  an  experiment  with 
and  a  reversal  of  the  laws  of  the  orderly 
hmnan  society,  as  men  now  understand 
these  laws,  it  means  revolution  and 
anarchy.  If  it  means  the  estabhshment 
of  equal  justice  in  human  relations,  a 
new  world  appears.  With  an  educated 
and  alert  people  impractical  and  vision- 
ary social  schemes  usually  run  a  brief 
course.  We  may  safely  rely  on  the  re- 
pression of  revolutionary  movements 
because  our  people  have  come  to  know 
what  any  swift  intrusion  into  the  social 
order  means.  Any  preconceived  scheme 
of  government  is  always  an  absurdity. 
Society  is  a  life ;  its  base  is  biologic,  and 
its  healthful  growth  is  by  the  inherency 
of  law  which  resents  any  rude  me- 
chanical handhng.  It  grows  not  at  all 
except  in  the  direction  of  the  human 
destination. 

The  political  doctrinaire  flashes  in 
.87 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

and  flashes  out,  and  leaves  little  but  the 
smell  of  his  own  powder  and  matches. 
No  untried  thing  is  ever  foisted  in- 
stantly on  an  intelligent  self -ruled  peo- 
ple. They  have  no  way  of  bringing  any 
radical  shift  instantly  about.  When  the 
good  man  of  the  house  goes  to  consult 
his  wife,  that  takes  some  time ;  and  when 
they  both  go  out  to  consult  the  neigh- 
borhood, other  days  elapse.  The  people 
who  get  impatient  of  the  slow  plodders, 
might  as  well  go  count  their  fingers 
until  these  neighbors  get  the  hang  of 
themselves.  This  is  the  way  of  the 
democracy,  and  it  is  a  good  way.  We 
do  not  patronize  a  sound  social  princi- 
ple when  we  give  it  time  to  gestate — it 
takes  its  own  time  usually.  Any  new 
spirit  potency  in  government  is  an  im- 
mortal factor,  and  it  does  not  appear, 
like  Jonah's  gourd,  a  new  thing  in  a 
night.  In  the  setting  of  new  policies  to 
fit  the  new  phases  of  a  community  life 
it  is  important  that  some  hot  blast  of 
eiiperience  shall  show  where  the  slag  is. 

88 


SOCIALISM 

In  the  yet  undiscovered  clues  to  the 
larger  liberty  and  the  broader  human 
life  let  no  test  of  caution  and  safety  be 
neglected.  Fear  not  the  sober  majori- 
ties, but  draw  back  from  the  Jehu  who 
drives  furiously. 

Abraham  Lincoln  was  the  most  un- 
erring statesman  of  the  nation's  life, 
and  one  reason  for  it  was  that  he  could 
not  be  hurried  to  his  conclusions.  He 
gave  his  own  convictions  time  to  brew, 
and  he  never  went  forward  until  he  had 
thought  himself  through.  So  the  cau- 
tion of  conservatism  is  needed  in  every 
new  movement  among  Western  peoples 
toward  the  transfer  of  power  from  the 
property-owning  class  to  the  wage- 
earning  class.  On  the  face  of  the  move- 
ment there  can  be  no  valid  reason 
again nt  it  if  the  intent  is  justice  rather 
than  the  ascendency  of  a  class. 

Without  question,  the  factor  of  prop- 
erty has  had  too  much  to  do  in  shaping 
political  and  economic   policies.     But 
nothing  would  be  gained  in  a  transfer 
89 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

from  one  ruthless  self-seeking  spirit  to 
another.  Being  in  the  majority,  the 
responsibihties  of  rulership  may  yet 
come  to  the  wage-earner.  And  if  he 
should  interpret  his  new  power  as  the 
trimnph  of  his  kind  rather  than  as  an 
investment  for  the  common  welfare,  his 
blunder  will  be  as  great  as  that  which 
he  has  overthrown.  The  rulership 
which  aims  to  exploit  appears  to  be  on 
its  last  pegs,  and  the  rulership  which 
aims  to  get  even  is  only  one  degree  bet- 
ter. What  a  blind  provincialism  it  is 
where  the  social  solidarity  does  not  ap- 
pear! The  principle  of  solidarity  in 
human  society  moves  in  the  direction 
of  reahzing  a  democratic  centralization 
of  adequate  power  to  hold  in  itself  the 
first  and  commanding  appeal  for  the 
welfare  of  all  alike.  It  means  the  offer- 
ing of  life's  chances  to  any  child  born. 
It  means  to  make  of  itself  a  benefit  with- 
out distinction  of  race  or  color  or  pur- 
suit. Its  business  is  to  administer  jus- 
tice, and  bestow  advantage  to  life's  ut- 
90 


SOCIALISM 

most  limits.  Nobody  left  out — nobody 
forgotten.  It  is  the  throughgoing 
unity,  open  to  all  the  roadside  voices, 
so  that  the  little  people  may  have  some- 
what to  say.  It  is  a  power  and  a  benefi- 
cence with  its  center  of  control  just 
above  everybody's  head.  It  is  the  ad- 
ministrative self -poise  which  has  com- 
mand of  itself  under  all  the  inequalities 
of  human  condition,  either  of  capacity 
or  possession  or  of  morals.  It  does  not 
undertake  to  work  miracles  or  reverse 
natural  law,  or  to  guarantee  peace  and 
plenty  to  those  who  do  not  make  effort, 
but  it  means  capacity  for  administra- 
tion without  assuming  the  role  of  a 
paternity. 


91 


VI 

THE  SOIL 

Suppose  the  people  who  dream 
dreams  have  seen  them  all  come  true. 
Wars  have  ceased  under  the  agis  of 
some  universal  league  of  peace.  In- 
temperance no  longer  blights  the  na- 
tions. The  social  evil  is  driven  from 
its  festering  place  in  the  human  flesh. 
Provision  is  made  against  the  extremes 
of  poverty.  The  standards  of  business 
life  are  crowned  with  goodness  and 
honor.  The  strife  of  class  is  supplanted 
by  the  accepted  understandings  which 
make  men  of  different  pursuits  look 
each  other  in  the  face  with  confidence 
and  good  will.  The  scavengers  of 
disease  all  have  surrendered  to  the  mas- 
tery of  science.  The  causes  of  insanity 
are  done  away  and  our  asylums  vacated. 
Each  new  child  is  born  into  the  world 
92 


THE  SOIL 

with  the  rights  of  health  and  a  chance 
to  get  on.  No  human  hand  is  ever  set 
against  another  in  hfe's  peaceful  pur- 
suits. The  laws  of  health  are  so  mas- 
tered as  to  bring  the  average  of  life  up 
to  a  hundred  and  fifty  years. 

How  long  after  that  will  it  be  till  the 
world  is  overpopulated  ?  Is  the  race 
to  be  defeated  in  the  greatness  of  its 
moral  achievements?  Will  the  popula- 
tions of  the  earth  ever  crowd  its  capacity 
for  subsistence?  There  is  only  so  much 
land  and  so  much  sea.  If  the  millions 
who  are  now  put  out  of  life  so  ruthlessly 
in  war  are  permitted  to  live  and  come  to 
the  lengthened  years,  with  those  who  are 
free  from  disease  and  other  like  casu- 
alties, what  is  to  be  done  with  the 
massed  multitudes?  Will  there  be 
standing  room?  This  far-away  anxiety 
is  worth  at  least  as  much  as  the  demon- 
stration of  the  geologists  that  the  earth 
is  freezing  up  at  the  rate  of  one  degree 
every  thirty  thousand  years.  It  would 
be  a  new  experience  for  human  beings 
93 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

to  suffer  the  defeat  of  general  pros- 
perity. 

One  time  there  was  a  man  Child  born 
in  a  manger  because  there  was  no  room 
for  him  in  the  inn;  but  that  fact  did 
not  hinder  him  from  finding  a  large 
place  in  human  history.  The  curse  of 
the  earth  has  not  been  in  its  human 
numbers.  The  densest  populations 
have  always  been  advantaged  where 
they  have  been  morally  and  spiritually 
related,  and  have  been  obedient  to  sound 
discretion.  This  world  can  be  vastly 
more  populous  than  it  is  and  with  profit 
to  all  who  live  in  it.  The  resources  of 
the  earth  may  be  indefinitely  multipHed. 
The  present  population  could  be  made 
to  live  on  life's  wastages.  Not  one  half 
of  the  soil  of  the  earth  is  yet  utilized. 
Its  richest  fertilities  yet  lie  buried  in 
tropical  growths.  In  old  Europe  and 
in  old  England  great  acreages  are  yet 
kept  as  hunting  preserves  for  titled 
snobs.  In  a  needless  way  the  earth  is 
being  cultivated  destructively.  The  pre- 
94 


THE  SOIL 

historic  peoples  of  the  South  American 
Andes  knew  better  how  to  make  each 
square  foot  produce  than  the  modern 
boasted  agriculturist.  If  the  issue  of 
the  limit  of  human  subsistence  is  made 
with  the  soil,  the  end  of  the  world  is  not 
in  sight.  It  is  the  negligible  factor  in 
economic  calculation. 

And  yet  the  question  of  subsistence 
is  sure  to  bring  distress  to  this  earth  in 
the  days  ahead.  Hunger  Lane  will 
probably  never  be  deserted.  The  rush 
will  continue  away  from  the  soil  which 
is  the  mother  of  us  all.  Those  who  fly 
from  the  mother  life  will  for  a  time  find 
provender  and  a  fire,  but  that  movement 
will  not  be  a  permanence.  The  limit  is 
ahead  and  not  far  out  of  sight.  Popu- 
lation does  not  crowd  subsistence — it 
crowds  into  the  desert  spaces  of  the 
cities.  That  which  the  city  produces 
is  not  subsistence.  The  city  is  the  place 
where  the  stuff  of  the  soil  is  shuffled — 
and  there  are  too  many  shufflers  and  not 
enough  diggers  in  the  dirt.  The  city  is 
95 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

the  place  where  each  one  tries  to  pinch 
off  a  piece  of  whatever  he  handles.  It 
is  also  the  place  where  the  fight  for 
bread  begins.  The  soil-tillers  have  no 
bickering  about  a  place  to  work,  for  the 
work  of  ten  lies  in  the  reach  of  each  one. 
The  more  people  in  the  country  the  less 
the  cost  of  living.  The  more  people 
in  the  city  the  higher  the  cost  of  living. 
In  the  country  everybody  produces  the 
market;  in  the  city  everybody  crowds 
it.  Industrial  strife  and  competition 
begin  with  urban  peoples.  In  the  coun- 
try one  can  produce  food  for  many. 
All  the  large  cities  of  the  earth  are  now 
the  breeders  of  retrogressive  spots 
where  the  human  life  in  them  sinks  be- 
low any  savagery.  Its  congestion  has 
become  a  remediless  evil,  and  under 
present  tendencies  it  is  sure  to  grow. 
Sooner  or  later  the  folks  in  the  cities 
will  have  to  go  out  and  rediscover  the 
soil.  They  will  have  to  kiss  it  and  love 
it,  and  make  peace  with  its  conditions, 
and  make  it  the  place  where  the  life  cen- 

96 


THE  SOIL 

ters  and  its  destiny  is  worked  out.  The 
soil  lost  its  charm  with  Adam  when  he 
appropriated  that  which  was  forbidden 
rather  than  work.  Soil-tilling  is  the 
earth's  greatest  blessing  and  the  earth's 
greatest  tragedy.  Millet  in  his  famous 
painting,  "Man  with  the  Hoe,"  has  be- 
come an  apostle  of  despair.  He  inter- 
prets the  misunderstanding  of  labor. 
He  pictures  the  soul's  ghost  with  its 
falsehoods  and  betrayals.  He  pictures 
a  working  machine,  dull,  sullen  and 
blundering,  when  the  response  of  nature 
to  the  touch  of  his  hoe  ought  to  have 
sent  him  into  laughter  and  shouting. 
The  world  fails  in  its  transformations 
because  the  soil  for  so  many  loses  its 
power  to  hold  until  it  enriches. 

From  the  time  when  human  beings 
began  to  build  urban  centers  the  rural 
inhabitant  has  always  been  at  an  eco- 
nomic disadvantage.  The  city  dweller 
who  has  never  had  the  country  experi- 
ence, and  the  countryman  who  came  to 
town  so  long  ago  as  to  have  lost  his  per- 
97 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

sonal  memory,  both  grow  ecstatic  over 
the  hfe  of  the  great  independent.  But 
country  hfe  has  always  been  a  good  hfe 
from  which  to  make  a  shift  into  some- 
thing else.  The  alert  and  quick-witted 
of  the  breed  to-day  break  for  the  cities. 
Clubs  and  coercions  could  not  stop 
them.  The  softer  life  is  in  the  city,  as 
it  looks  to  those  who  go:  not  so  much 
sweat,  not  so  much  dirt,  not  so  much 
sunbm-n,  not  so  much  frostbite,  not  so 
many  long  hours,  not  so  much  wearing 
of  one  suspender,  not  so  much  lonesome- 
ness.  Before  they  go  they  never  take 
a  trip  through  slum  streets.  They  see 
paved  walks  and  palaces,  and  men  of 
prominence  in  fine  clothes — and  in 
every  one  a  brag  about  being  country 
born.  Country  viriHty  is  an  asset  in  the 
tussle  of  city  life.  There  is  more  or  less 
variety  in  a  place  where  people  stand 
on  one  another's  shoulders  rather  than 
on  the  ground — and  not  very  much 
mystery  about  it.  People  go  toward  a 
glitter  hke  a  bug  toward  a  candle ;  and 

98 


THE  SOIL 

reason  for  the  glitter  may  not  be  found 
in  the  country.  The  shamble  which  the 
clods  put  into  a  man's  gait  is  not  good 
form.  Your  country  man  is  a  rough- 
looker.  The  manner  of  his  life  makes 
him  so.  He  looks  hke  the  weather. 
His  feet  get  cut  with  the  flint  of  life's 
way,  and  he  cannot  escape  the  pain  of  it. 
In  the  ancient  world,  uniformly,  the 
soil-digger  is  the  under  man.  His  con- 
dition was  one  of  desperate  poverty. 
He  was  always  the  first  to  be  exploited 
because  he  was  first  to  touch  life's  neces- 
sities. The  condition  of  the  modern 
tiUer  of  the  Nile  Valley  is  not  improved 
over  the  man  who  did  similar  work  four 
thousand  years  ago.  The  endless  gen- 
erations have  kept  nothing  to  show  of 
the  unfailing  gifts  of  a  garden  land. 
What  might  be  an  advance  is  appropri- 
ated by  those  who  neither  dig  nor  sow. 
Two  blue  cotton  shii-ts  and  seed  enough 
for  next  year  are  supposed  to  be  his 
dower  from  the  Almighty.  The  dam 
at  Fashoda  is  an  Enghsh  monopoly  and 
99 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

only  increases  his  tribute.  There  is  no 
outlook  for  him.  He  has  inherited  the 
spirit  of  those  who  toiled  for  a  genera- 
tion, without  remuneration,  to  build  a 
tomb  for  one  of  their  kind. 

The  average  soil-tiller  of  China  is  a 
stranger  to  any  variety  or  sufficiency  of 
food.  He  is  the  patient  one  under  a 
burden  never  lifted.  To  miss  a  lick  is 
to  get  behind  with  some  necessity.  His 
wife  lies  down  in  a  houseboat,  struggles 
with  God  for  a  new  life  in  her  child,  and 
in  three  hours  she  is  up  and  about  her 
work. 

The  soil-tillers  all  over  India  are  piti- 
ably poor.  They  are  cringing  and  sub- 
servient. The  Russian  peasant  until 
recent  years  was  little  more  than  an  in- 
dustrious and  patient  serf.  He  now 
dreams  of  liberty  and  an  outlook, 
neither  of  which  is  to  come  to  him  until 
he  is  another  kind  of  man  with  another 
vision.  Ambassador  Gerard  says  the 
German  peasant  is  the  worst-fooled 
man    in    all    the    world.     He    knows 

100 


THE  SOIL 

nothing  of  large  wealth  accumulation. 
Only  by  heroic  toil  and  economy  does  he 
get  on  at  all.  Enghsh  agriculture  as  a 
pursuit  in  competition  with  others  broke 
down  years  ago.  The  hard  work  of  it 
and  the  undesirable  life  of  it  has  cut 
down  production. 

The  French  peasants,  men  and 
women,  are  work  oxen.  They  make  the 
soil  break  out  in  laughter — they  get  so 
tired  they  cannot  laugh.  The  hacienda 
man  of  Mexico  is  practically  a  slave. 
The  highest  type  countryman  of  the 
ages  is  the  American  farmer.  Popula- 
tion started  here  with  a  wild  country. 
City  life  had  practically  nothing  to  do 
with  initiating  the  American  manner  of 
living  which  has  put  the  stamp  of  itself 
over  the  whole  of  our  territory.  Many 
countrymen  have  been  and  are  pros- 
perous to-day.  The  circumstances  have 
been  for  them  favorable  beyond  prec- 
edent. Climate  and  soil  and  resources 
of  all  kinds  have  been  at  hand,  and  a 
varied  and  vigorous  stock  of  men  and 

101 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

women  have  made  these  the  mandibles 
of  then-  power  to  spring,  Midaslike, 
into  a  nation's  prosperity.  He  is  at  this 
moment  the  one  sturdy  type  of  man  who 
stands  between  vast  populations  and 
their  hunger  unto  death. 

What  nervous  interest  we  now  take 
in  this  man  between  the  rows  of  corn! 
He  hears  a  bedlam  of  voices  saying, 
"For  God's  sake  make  two  blades  of 
grass  grow  where  one  grew  before!'* 
Food  shortage  means  what  it  says. 
Farmers  are  not  producing  enough  to 
feed  themselves  and  those  who  work  in 
other  ways.  Is  it  his  fault?  Has  he 
become  lazy?  Has  he  become  a  peter- 
dick  in  his  business,  unable  to  make  the 
ground  produce?  Has  his  wife  quit 
work?  Is  it  of  mahce  in  him  to  starve 
the  folks  who  dislike  the  soiled  hand? 
Is  he  indifferent  about  having  an  abund- 
ance for  the  market?  Is  it  lack  of  brains 
in  him  to  see  the  point  and  take  the  ad- 
vantage of  wind  and  weather?  States- 
men ^re  giving  him  advice.  Bankers 
102 


THE  SOIL 

are  taking  great  interest  in  him.  State 
legislatures  are  paying  the  expenses  of 
farmers'  institutes  to  get  more  things  in 
his  head.  County  superintendents  are 
being  put  over  him.  Folks  in  kid  gloves 
are  telling  him  how  to  do  it. 

Is  it  so  that  he  is  a  dull  intellect  on 
which  the  experience  of  years  posits  no 
value?  Are  these  country  people  actu- 
ally in  need  of  kindergarten  instruction 
on  the  value  of  clover,  and  manure,  and 
changes  of  crops,  and  balanced  rations, 
and  tilling,  and  breeds  of  stock,  and 
home  economies,  and  the  thousand  other 
things  over  which  they  have  been  worn 
to  a  frazzle  for  generations?  The  great 
good-humored  food  commissioner  of  the 
United  States  is  now  actually  telling 
these  countrywomen  that  they  can  make 
clabber  cheese  out  of  sour  milk.  He  is 
urging  them  especially  to  economize  in 
family  expense  when  there  are  millions 
of  them  feeding  their  famiHes  a  whole 
year  on  less  money  than  he  pays  for  a 
fortnight's  house  rent.  That  kind  of  pa- 

103 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

ternalism  is  harmless,  but  it  lacks  dig- 
nity. When  food  prices  are  to  be  held 
within  limits,  the  farmer  is  the  first  man 
nailed  down.  Those  between  him  and 
the  consmner  are  not  nailed  down  be- 
cause they  have  the  commercial  under- 
standings. At  the  close  of  the  War  of 
the  Rebellion  wheat  sold  at  two  dollars 
and  forty  cents,  and  the  loaf  then  was 
twice  as  large  at  five  cents  as  the  ten- 
cent  loaf  is  now,  because  then  the  miller 
and  the  baker  and  the  grocer  were  sub- 
lime independents,  as  the  farmer  is  now. 
Farmers  have  not  yet  learned  to  protect 
themselves  from  a  manipulated  market. 
It  is  destiny  for  any  class  which  makes 
no  prices  and  sets  no  terms  to  be  thrown 
under  finally.  The  farmer  is  yet  averse 
to  any  organized  economic  defense  of 
himself.  His  numbers  are  too  great  to 
build  for  himself,  without  difficulty,  an 
industrial  guild.  But  suppose  he  should 
unionize  himself?  He  is  not  an  under- 
ling yet.  He  is  a  man  of  mettle  and 
strength.  He  is  intelhgent — ^knows  the 
104 


THE  SOIL 

law  of  mutual  fair  dealing  and  of  jus- 
tice. Suppose  a  wave  of  solidarity 
should  sweep  through  his  ranks  and  he 
should  by  concert  of  understanding  re- 
fuse to  bring  his  stuff  to  town?  He  is 
the  best  prepared  man  on  earth  for  a 
general  strike.  He  would  not  ask  for 
much  but  to  be  let  alone.  He  could  sup- 
ply himself  with  food.  He  could  dig  a 
hole  in  the  ground  and  get  his  coal.  He 
could  skin  a  sheep  and  crawl  into  the 
hide.  Ought  he  to  do  it  ?  No.  Ought  he 
to  be  allowed?  No.  He  would  exercise, 
then,  clearly  an  unsocial  power.  It 
would  have  in  it  the  revolutionary 
threat.  It  would  be  against  public 
policy.  He  would  make  little  children 
cry  for  bread.  It  would  be  the  last  act 
where  the  tragedy  of  labor  had  turned 
into  fury.  It  would  be  a  power  exer- 
cised without  any  national  adjudication 
of  its  righteousness.  It  would  be  a 
power  which  takes  itself  for  granted,  as 
Germanv  does  to-day.  No  class  has  the 
right  to  that  sort  of  projection  of  power 

105 


THE  TRAGEDY  OF  LABOR 

into  the  industrial  life  of  the  nation.  It 
might  reach  its  aim,  but  it  would  de- 
stroy the  social  order. 

I  wish  for  the  American  farmer  that 
he  may  remain  the  gi'eat  good-himiored 
individualist.  The  fact  of  it  puts  him 
at  a  disadvantage  commercially.  He 
knows  that  as  well  as  anybody.  He 
knows  that  he  deals  single-handed  with 
a  complex  of  manipulated  prices.  He 
knows  that,  coming  and  going,  he  is  the 
cornered  man;  but  he  has  the  one  ad- 
vantage of  having  a  business  which  lies 
next  to  the  great  mother  of  us  all.  For 
life*s  flat  necessities  he  yet  has  an  equal 
chance.  His  clothing  is  not  quite  so 
good,  and  it  is  not  quite  so  fine  a  fit. 
His  house  does  not  average  with  the  city 
dweller,  and  public  utilities  are  not  so 
fully  in  reach  of  him ;  but  he  hves  close 
by  the  fountains  of  sustenance,  and  he 
is  a  feeder  of  all  the  people,  and  he  will 
continue  to  do  this  and  prosper  if  he 
is  permitted  to  share  in  life  equities. 
He  is  not  a  sleepy  head.  He  is  aware 
106 


THE  SOIL 

of  himself  and  his  age.  He  has  not  the 
temper  for  being  used  for  general  pur- 
poses. He  could  be  goaded  to  self-de- 
fense and  drive  down  the  road  in  a  jug- 
gernaut car.  God  spare  my  country 
from  that  culmination  of  the  class  con- 
flict! 


107 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 

Los  Angeles 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


20m-7,'67(H3149s4) 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    000  821  644 


HN 


n.66i 


i 


PUEAC^  DO   NOT    REMOVE 
HHI5   BOOK  CARD    , 


.^lUBRARYQ^^ 


^ 


■u.  Research  Library 


